Priority Two: Instructional Materials

Repairing the reading order with Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro Part 1

This section on repairing on a PDF requires the use of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. This tool is not accessible to users who are blind or have visual impairments that prevent them from viewing the screen. It requires the use of a mouse and can require fine motor control which some users may have difficulty performing. Unfortunately at this time there is no work around for this issue. If you are affected by an impairment that will prevent you from performing these functions we encourage you to seek assistance with the office of Media Services, 654-2391.

There are a variety of documents that you may have to repair the reading order on and depending which type you have will determine the easiest method of repair. If you are working from a document that was originally authored in Word or another word processing application it is best to make the corrections in that environment. A properly organized and structured Word document has tags (tags are control elements that describe how the PDf is organized) where a document that has been scanned in and undergone the OCR process (See PDF Creation) will not have tags and they must be manually created. This next section covers the process of properly tagging a PDF document.

Adding tags to an untagged PDF

  1. Select "Advanced" from the menu bar
  2. Select "Accessibility"
  3. Select "Add Tags to Document"

Once you have added tags to the document Acrobat will do a best guess interpretation of your document and how it is organized. It is a useful tool, but it is not perfect. You should evalaute the document's reading order. If the reading order is not appropriate you can use the Touch Up Reading Order tool.

Touch Up Reading Order tool

To access the Touch Up Reading Order tool:

  1. Select "Advanced" from the menu bar
  2. Select "Accessibility"
  3. Select "TouchUp Reading Order tool"

If you launch the TouchUp Reading Order (TURO) tool and you see that none of the text is contained in grayed out boxes your document does not contain tags. You should go back and add tags before you change the reading order of the document. When your document has tags and you launch the TURO you should see something similar to the image below:

A PDF document that is undergoing the TouchUp Reading Order process. Large gray rectangles encompass all of the text and images. The boxes are numbered with small white boxes in the upper right corners that function as selectors. Each element is contained within a greyed out rectangle. Each rectangle has a number in a white box, the order in which it will be read by assistive technology. The small white box is the selector control. To modify the properties of a rectangle you must first click in the small white box and then perform the desired function in the TURO control panel. Close up of the white box that is the selector control and the number that displays the reading order this particular element is for this page.


Touch Up Reading Order tool control panel. Buttons include Text, Headings, Form Fields, Images, and Tables. It also contains controls to clear page structure. The Touch Up Reading Order tool is especially useful for documents that the software can not accurately describe the order in which it should be read. Using this tool you can discard the structure of a page and recreate it manually. This process can be time consuming, especially for multi page PDF's, which is why the use of a structured source document is so desirable.

Once you have discarded the structure of a page you must make your selections in the order in which you want the items to be read. This program is unforgiving in that there is no undo option. Once you have made your selections and you decide you'd like to go back three steps and make a different selection you must start the entire process over. Planning is essential when performing this work.


Continue to Restructuring a PDF page with the TouchUp Reading Order Tool