6 | Acrobat 9 Pro PDF Accessibility Repair Workflow

means the content is not accessible to users who rely on assistive technology to hear the contents of the page.

Additional work must take place to make the document accesible.

Note: If you are certain that the PDF document is not a scanned document or it has previously

undergone optical character recognition, you can skip this discussion and proceed to

“Step 3: Add Interactive Features: Form Fields and Buttons” on page 8.

How to Tell if a PDF File is a Scanned Document

There are a number of indications that a PDF file originated from a scanned page. Onscreen, the document

appears to contain text, but the page is actually an image. Choose the method that suits you best for

determining if the PDF is from a scan and is an “image only” PDF.

• Note if the page appears to be skewed. Sometimes sheets are not properly fed into the

scanner with the effect being the page appears to be crooked, or skewed on the screen .

Lines of text will not be straight but will appear to slant up or down (See “Figure 1 Skewed

Text Indicates a Scanned PDF” on page 6)

Figure 1 Skewed Text Indicates a Scanned PDF

• Search for characters that appear on the page. Use the find command in Acrobat to

search for text that appears on the page. Select Edit > Find (Ctrl + F on Windows or

Option + F on Mac OS) and type a term that appears on the page in the search field.

If the document was scanned, Acrobat will not find the search but will display a message

indicating “Acrobat has finished searching the document. No matches were found”.

• Zoom in and check for jagged edges on smooth characters. Scanned images are bitmaps

(See “Figure 2 Bitmap text (top) and text that has undergone OCR (bottom)” on

page 7)The edges of curves on bit maps will not appear to be smooth or rounded but will

be jagged as shown in the top sample illustrating the word “Ozone” in Figure 2 on page 7

Use the marquee zoom tool in Acrobat to define the area and magnify the edges of curved

letters such as “c”, “s”, and “o”. Text that has undergone the OCR process using the

Making PDF Accessible with Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro