Adobe Products | Support | Purchase | Company Info

Search | Contact us | Shopping Cart

Acrobat product page

Acrobat accessibility

Information and resources

Online conversion tools

Acrobat downloads

Adobe Acrobat - How To Create Accessible Adobe® PDF Files Booklet

Working with Scanned and Paper Documents
This section describes how to make tagged Adobe PDF files if your source document is a paper document, a scanned image of a paper document, or a PDF Image Only file.

You can use Acrobat 5.0 with a scanner to create a an Adobe PDF file from a paper document. However, the resulting file is a PDF Image Only file-that is, bitmap pictures of the pages. Although the file can be viewed in Acrobat, the text is not recognizable by the application as characters and words. Among other things, this means that the text displayed on those pages can't be recognized as such by Acrobat or screen readers, and is therefore not accessible.

If you want to be able to search, correct, and copy the text in a PDF Image Only file and make it accessible as tagged Adobe PDF, you need to "capture" the pages in the file with Adobe Acrobat Capture 3.0 software. Similarly, if you have scanned paper documents and have not saved the scanned images as Adobe PDF files yet, you can use Acrobat Capture to create tagged Adobe PDF files.

Adobe Acrobat Capture 3.0 enables you to set up customized workflows for your unique document-processing requirements. Here you'll learn the basic steps needed to create a custom workflow that automates the steps for bringing in PDF Image Only files and scanned images, and making them accessible.

Important: You need the Tag Adobe PDF agent in order to create a tagged PDF file. This is a separate agent that will be available for purchase from Adobe in the second quarter of 2001. For more information, see the Acrobat Capture product page at www.adobe.com.

PDF Image Only workflow and image file workflow
PDF Image Only workflow and image file workflow

To set up a workflow for converting paper documents or PDF Image Only files to searchable, tagged Adobe PDF:

  1. Set up a workflow in Acrobat Capture 3.0 that consists of these agents in this order:
    • (For PDF Image Only files) Split multipage PDF Image file to process each page of the PDF Image Only file.
    • (For PDF Image Only files) Convert Image to TIFF to make the image on each page usable for the optical character recognition (OCR) software that will be applied by the Capture Image agent.
    • Capture Image to apply OCR to each page as marked with the zone template. (The zone template lets specify areas on pages to treat as containing text or images.)
    • QuickFix Page to let you review and correct suspect text on each page.
    • Bind Pages to assemble the individual pages into a single document.
    • Export to PDF agent to save the file as an Adobe PDF file.
    • Tag PDF to create a tagged Adobe PDF file. (This is a separately purchased plug-in available from Adobe.)
    • Store File (PDF) to store the file in Adobe PDF in the location you specify.
  2. Click Done.
  3. In the Configure palette, select the Export to PDF agent. Then right-click and choose Properties.
  4. Click the General tab. For Page Content, choose Formatted Text and Graphics or Searchable Image Exact. (These are the only two flavors of Adobe PDF files that can be made accessible.) Then click OK.
  5. In the Configure palette, select the Tag Adobe PDF agent. Then right-click and choose Properties.
  6. Choose which language to use in discerning word breaks, select the options shown, and click OK.
  7. In the Configure palette, select the Store File agent. Then right-click and choose Properties.
  8. Enter a location in which to store the resulting tagged Adobe PDF files and click OK.

To run the Acrobat Capture workflow you created:

  1. Open Acrobat Capture.
  2. Click the Configure palette tab.
  3. Click the Run button ( ) for your Tag Adobe PDF agent in the Configure palette.
  4. Click the Submit palette tab.
  5. In that palette, select the folder or files you want to capture.
  6. At the bottom of the Submit palette, choose how you want to treat files, and how you want to combine the images.
  7. From the Target Workflow menu at the bottom of the Submit palette, choose the workflow you created.
  8. Click the Submit to Workflow button at the bottom of the palette.
  9. Use the QuickFix tool to review and correct suspect text on each page.

The image files are automatically assembled into a single file, exported to Adobe PDF with tagged Adobe PDF, and stored.

Before you publish the file, be sure to take advantage of the accessibility tools available in Acrobat 5.0. To do so, follow the instructions provided in "Using the Accessibility Checker". If needed, use the Tags palette as described in "Using the Tags Palette". When you're done, test the file with a screen reader as described in "Testing Your Adobe PDF Files for Accessibility".

Continue to:

Back to the How To Create Accessible Adobe PDF Files Booklet main page