How to make PDF accessible for people using JAWS

[abah19453951]

Hello! I urgently need to make a PDF accessible for someone using JAWS how do I do that?

I have converted a large document using Adobe Reader DC however the person needs to be able to read it using his JAWS reading software.

How do I make this document accessible? Is this something I can do with Adobe Reader R01? If so how?

Thank you so much in advance.

Thanks,

Ax

[jane-e · Accepted solution]

Hi abah19453951

It’s best to only post in one forum, as the same people answer in both places, so I locked the other one:

How to make PDF accessible for people using JAWS

No, you can’t do anything with the free Reader.

I am not an expert, and I hope others will step in, but it is a holiday week in the USA, so I’ll start.

It works best if the Word document has paragraph and character styles for everything and nothing is unstyled. Check your Word file and do this in Word while you wait for another response.

When you create the PDF, be sure Tagged PDF is checked.

Here is a web link to the PDFA Association: https://www.pdfa.org/pdfua-creation-tools/

[a_C_student]

Too add to jane-e's advice ...

As jane-e alluded, you are much better off if your source document is accessible. If using MS Word, make sure your doc passes the accessibility checker built into Word (styles are a great start but there is much more to it). You will need Adobe Acrobat Pro, and it is kinda expensive. Depending on what you mean by "Accessible" (e.g. "JAWS can sort of make sense of it" or "meets WCAG 2.0" or "meets both WCAG 2.0 and ISO 14289") a good PDF accessibility checker - better than the one built into Acrobat Pro - is your friend. PAC 3 from Access for All is excellent and free and Google will easily find it. If you go for ISO 14289 conformance then the Matterhorn Protocol provides the compliance criteria (again, Google will find it) - see https://taggedpdf.com/508-pdf-help-center/  (this is a shameless plug for my website, if that was not obvious). If you are happy with some lesser level of accessibility, then the applicable compliance criteria for whatever that is. Remember that any automated checker can only help with a subset of accessibility issues - many require knowledgeable human inspection and that knowledge is hard fought and not for free. And ... if you were thinking this would be entirely automated or otherwise easy, sorry for that.

[yn]

I will second the PAC 2 or PAC 3 check app. It's a free download and is quite easy and logical. Actually, it's drag-and-drop. You get a nice table report marking all errors and potential issues along with a highlight of the actual error in context of your PDF page to know exactly where it is at. The report provides excellent keyword topics for each error that you can then search the taggpdf.com site for videos explaining the error and how best to resolve it.

From time to time I cannot find the exact error descriptions, but with experience I have learned that sometimes one error type applies to several, slightly different named errors. For those cases, the solutions have generally been the same. So it's just a matter of learning the lingo a bit to know where the overlap is.

Even still, once you run a check and all comes back green, you will need to actually text your document in a screen reader. NVDA is free. JAWS has a demo that you  can use but you are restricted to a 40-minute use per session. After that time is up you must reboot your system for a new 40-minute run. It's really a pain and, in my limited experience, does not work nearly as well as other free readers, specifically for table data. Actually, I will be posting a question for issues I've run into using JAWS and Acrobat table data later today! Thanks for the reminder 😜

@A_C_student if that is your website, great job. Very helpful. I would actually LOVE to pick your brain over a few questions if ever you're bored enough to point me in a direction or two.

[jane-e]

abah19453951

Hi Ax,

You asked me why I locked your other thread. The forum does not allow for duplicate posts. Although the duplicate thread in Acrobat General Troubleshooting is locked, it does link to this one.