Priority Two: Instructional Materials
Repairing the reading order with Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro Part 2
Removng the incorrect structure from a page
If after you have added tags to the document and the reading order is not correct you may be required to remove all of the structure and start over. Please note that the Touch Up Reading Order tool works one PDF page at a time, not the entire document. In the TORU control panel you will see a button labelled "Clear Page structure...". When you click it Adobe will prompt to make sure this is what you want to do. When you have confirmed the page you are working on will have no greyed out boxes surrounding any element. Now you must manually mark up the document in the correct order.
Restructuring the document
After discarding the tags from the document your next task will be to rebuild the structure of the document. You must select in order the elements as you want them read. You will be selecting a variety of elements and as you do so you will be identifying what type of element you are selecting to Adobe Acrobat. This is the entire process of restructuring a PDF document so that it is accessible. Below are instructions on how to select elements and the special instructions for each type of element you will be selecting.
Order of selections
The order in which you select elements is of the utmost importance. You must select them in the order in which you want them read. On complex documents you may wish to save seperate versions of the document so that you may step back, otherwise you will have to start the page over from the beginning if you make a mistake.
Below is an image of a PDF page where the header has been selected. Click it for a larger view
Making selections
When making a selection remember to enclose the entire object you wish to select. This can be difficult when elements are close together. If your selection does not enclose all that you wish, or encloses more, just click once on the document and try again. Elements that are part of the selection you have made are outlined in light blue.
Identifying your selection as the appropriate type
There are a number of element types that you can identify:
- Figure or Image
- Text
- Headings
- Table
- Form fields
Once the selection is appropriate select the correct type of element in the Touch Up Reading Order control panel. In the case of this example it is a figure.
Alternate Text note
This image has no alternative text at the moment. To make this document accessable we must provide an alternate text, but the Touch Up Reading Order tool is not the place to do it. Learn how to add alternate text to an image now.
Selecting text
When selecting text it is not necessary to select individual paragraphs. For single column documents you can select all of the text at once and tag as text in the Touch Up Reading Order tool. The image below demonstrates:
After the selection of text has been made click the "Text" button in the Touch Up Reading Order tool to identify it as text. A grey box surrounds the text and a white box with a number inside it appears indicating it's reading order on this page.
Headings
Using headings allows the document to be organized and for the assistive technology to recognize this organization. Many documents are organized but unfortunately they use visual cues to convey this organization and it is lost to anyone using assistive technology or if the document is transformed in such a way that visual formatting is lost. To ensure that the document organization is usable by all mark your headings using the appropriate heading identifiers in the touch up tool.
Tables
Continue to Repairing Tables page