PDF Files

i. As with HTML, you need to know what kinds of issues people with disabilities might encounter when reading PDF files. When people talk about the accessibility of Adobe Acrobat, or PDF files, they are usually referring to the accessibility of Acrobat to screen readers, but screen reader users are not the only people who should be considered when creating accessible PDF files. It is important to remember that not everyone with a disability is blind. You should also consider the needs of individuals with motor disabilities, hearing disabilities, cognitive disabilities or low vision. Let's look at some general guidelines for making PDF files accessible to people with other types of disabilities.
1. Before the release of Acrobat 5.0, PDF files were not accessible to screen readers in any meaningful way. Now it is possible to expose the text in PDF files to screen readers, but much like HTML, PDF files must be created with accessibility in mind. Otherwise, the files will be nearly as inaccessible as before Acrobat 5.0 came about. The bad news is that it usually takes more work to make PDF files accessible than it does to make HTML files accessible.
a. Three types of PDF documents—unstructured, structured, and tagged—only tagged PDF files are optimized for accessibility
b. Create a HTML version of PDF file
c. Two of the most popular screen readers, JAWS and Window-Eyes, currently claim to support the new PDF. Freedom Scientific has built PDF support into JAWS 3.7 and higher, and GW Micro has built PDF support into Window-Eyes 4.1 and higher. Currently, there is no accessibility support for PDF in non-Windows operating systems.