BlogEditPDFs.app

PDF Accessibility: Making PDFs Screen Reader Friendly

Mike · · 9 min read

Most PDFs look fine on screen — but for the roughly 7.6 million Americans who are blind or have low vision, a poorly structured PDF can be completely unreadable. Screen readers like JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver don't read what a document looks like — they read the underlying structure. If that structure is missing or wrong, users get a jumbled mess, or silence.

The good news: making a PDF accessible isn't complicated once you know what to fix. This guide covers the key requirements, how to check your current PDFs, and how to correct the most common problems — without expensive software.

What Makes a PDF "Accessible"?

An accessible PDF is one that assistive technologies can read, navigate, and interact with in a meaningful way. The standard most organizations follow is WCAG 2.2 AA (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and the PDF/UA-1 specification (ISO 14289). In practice, an accessible PDF must have:

Miss any of these, and the experience for a screen reader user ranges from frustrating to completely inaccessible.

Step 1: Check Whether Your PDF Has Real Text

The first thing to check is whether your PDF contains actual text or just images. This is especially common with scanned documents.

Here's a quick test:

  1. Open the PDF in any PDF viewer.
  2. Try to click and drag to select some text on the page.
  3. If you can highlight individual words, you have real text. If the entire page gets selected as a single image, the PDF is image-only.

If your PDF is image-only: You need to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) first to extract the text layer. See our guide on how to make a PDF searchable with OCR to fix this before doing anything else. Without real text, no accessibility fix will work.

Step 2: Check for PDF Tags

PDF tags are invisible structural markers embedded in the file. They're what screen readers actually interpret. A PDF without tags is like a webpage with no HTML — the content might be there, but without structure it's impossible to navigate.

To check if your PDF is tagged:

Step 3: Fix the Most Common Accessibility Issues

Problem: No Tags (Untagged PDF)

If a PDF was created by printing to PDF from a browser or old application, it often arrives untagged. The fix depends on your source:

Problem: Wrong Reading Order

Multi-column documents, sidebars, and complex layouts often have a scrambled reading order in the PDF tag tree. The visual layout might look correct, but a screen reader reads columns left-to-right across the page instead of down each column.

For example: imagine a two-column newsletter where column 1 discusses topic A and column 2 discusses topic B. A screen reader with a bad reading order might read: "Topic A headline, Topic B headline, first sentence of A, first sentence of B..." — completely incoherent.

Fixing this typically requires Adobe Acrobat Pro's Reading Order tool or a PDF accessibility remediation tool. In Acrobat Pro: View → Show/Hide → Navigation Panels → Reading Order, then drag the tagged elements into the correct sequence.

Problem: Images Without Alt Text

Any image that conveys meaning — a chart, photo, diagram, logo — needs a text description so screen reader users know what it shows. Purely decorative images (divider lines, background textures) should be tagged as "Artifact" so the screen reader skips them.

Good alt text describes what the image communicates, not just what it looks like. Instead of "Bar graph image," write "Bar graph showing sales growth from $1.2M in Q1 to $1.8M in Q4 2025."

Problem: Form Fields Without Labels

PDF forms are a frequent accessibility failure. A form field that visually shows "First Name" next to it will read as a blank input to a screen reader if the label isn't programmatically attached to the field.

When creating forms, use proper form-building tools that attach labels correctly. If you're fixing an existing PDF, Acrobat Pro lets you edit field properties to add tooltip text, which functions as the accessible label.

Problem: Missing Document Title

When a screen reader user opens a PDF, the first thing announced is the document title. If this is empty, they hear the filename — often something unhelpful like "Doc_v3_FINAL_PRINT.pdf."

Set a meaningful title in the document properties. In most PDF creation tools, this is under File → Properties or Document Settings before export.

Step 4: Test Your PDF with a Screen Reader

The only way to truly know if a PDF is accessible is to test it with actual assistive technology. Here are free options:

When testing, ask yourself: Does reading order make sense? Can you navigate by headings? Are images described? Can you fill out forms without visual reference?

Step 5: Use an Automated Checker

Manual testing is important, but automated checkers catch structural issues quickly:

Run automated checks first to get a baseline, then do manual screen reader testing to catch issues automated tools miss (like alt text that technically exists but is completely uninformative).

Quick Checklist Before Publishing a PDF

Legal Requirements: Who Needs to Worry?

In the United States, PDF accessibility requirements apply broadly:

Even if none of these apply to you directly, accessible PDFs rank better in search engines (Google can index tagged content more accurately), load more reliably on all devices, and simply work better for everyone — including users on mobile, low-bandwidth connections, or who just prefer keyboard navigation.

The Easiest Fix: Start With an Accessible Source

Retrofitting accessibility into existing PDFs is time-consuming. The most efficient approach is to build accessibility in from the start:

  1. Use heading styles in Word, Google Docs, or InDesign (not just big bold text).
  2. Add alt text to images before exporting.
  3. Export to PDF using the accessibility-preserving export option (not "Print to PDF").
  4. Run a quick automated check before distributing.

Five minutes of attention during creation saves hours of remediation later.

Need to Edit an Existing PDF?

If you're working with PDFs that someone else created — EditPDFs.app lets you edit text, add annotations, reorganize pages, and more, directly in your browser. No software to install, no account required. For PDFs that need OCR to become searchable, the OCR guide here walks through the process.

Accessible PDFs aren't just the right thing to do — they're better documents, full stop. Clear structure, searchable text, and logical organization make any PDF easier to use for everyone.