| 15 Acrobat 9 Pro PDF Accessibility Repair Workflow

Note: You can select multiple fields by holding the Control key as you click on each one.

Buttons

Buttons are most commonly associated with forms, but you can add them to any document. Buttons can

open a file, play a sound or movie clip, submit data to a web server, and much more. When deciding on how

to initiate an action, remember that buttons offer the following capabilities that links and bookmarks do not:

• A button can activate a single action or a series of actions.

• A button can change appearance in response to mouse actions.

• A button can be easily copied across many pages.

• Mouse actions can activate different button actions. For example, Mouse Down (a click), Mouse Up

(releasing after a click), Mouse Enter (moving the pointer over the button), and Mouse Exit

(moving the pointer away from the button) can all start a different action for the same button.

Buttons are an easy, intuitive way to let users initiate an action in PDF documents. Buttons are added the

same way as form fields while in Forms Editing mode. They also should be given a name and a Tooltip and

their behavior is determined by the actions the user assigns the button on the actions tab of the Button

Properties dialog. They also appear in the Tab order tree. See the Adobe Acrobat Help for a complete

discussion of PDF fields and buttons.

Set the Tab Order

If a PDF document doesn’t have a specified tab order, the default tabbing order is based on the document

structure unless the user has deselected the Tab Order option in the Accessibility preferences.

You can change the tabbing order after you create the fields.

• If you are in Forms Editing mode, you can order the tabs by document structure (default), row, or

column.

• You can also choose the order manually by dragging and dropping fields in the Fields panel.

• If you are not in Forms Editing mode, you can change the page properties to order the tabs by row

or column. However, you can’t customize the tab order manually.

To change the tab order, first select “Order Tabs Manually” from the Tab Order button on the Fields panel.

Then you can drag and drop fields where you want them within the Fields panel to modify the tab order (See

“Figure 10 Rearranging Tab Order with the Fields Panel” on page 16)

To assist in determining tab order, you can select “Show Tab Numbers” from the Tab Order button of the

Fields panel (See “Figure 10 Rearranging Tab Order with the Fields Panel” on page 16)

In the example shown in Figure 10 on page 16 , the check box labelled “operating system” is in the fifth

position. Selecting the entry for operating system in the Forms panel highlights the corresponding field in

Making PDF Accessible with Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro