In this tutorial, discover how to make your PDF files accessible to those using assistive devices like text-to-speech synthesizers and screen readers using Acrobat XI Pro.

Learn how to tap into the many accessibility features the Adobe Flash Platform has to offer. Flash Player, Flash Professional, and the Adobe Flex SDK have integrated support for screen readers and other assistive technology to get you started, as well as keyboard and captioning support, allowing you to build applications that are easier for everyone to use.

Accessibility laws for digital content are changing rapidly. Just as businesses are required by law to install and maintain accessible facilities, soon the requirement for accessible digital content will also be law. As the ubiquitous PDF file format becomes an accepted primary format for digital content, making PDFs (especially PDF forms) accessible to users of assistive technology becomes that much more important. This session demonstrates how to apply the guidelines of WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 to your PDF forms to improve accessibility and user experience. These best practices can also be applied to Flash and HTML5 forms as well.

Use InDesign and Acrobat Professional to create accessible content for persons with disabilities such as blindness, low vision, or limited mobility. Michael Murphy, Adobe Certified Expert, shows how InDesign can add structure, logical read order, and alternate text to graphics in documents that will be exported to PDF. With some added touch up using Acrobat Professional, these documents can be read using assistive technology such as screen readers and screen magnifiers.

In an Accessible PDF, the Tags Tree determines which content is perceived and announced by assistive technologies (screen readers). See how to safely remove Content from the Tags Tree in Acrobat 9 Professional.

If your PDF contains data tables, learn how to efficiently and accurately mark them up for Accessibility using the tagging, structure and reading order tools in Acrobat 9.

When converting a paper document to PDF, use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert scanned text to a format that Assistive Devices can read and understand.

Setting the language of a PDF document in Acrobat 9 Professional will allow Assistive technologies to interpret the words and sentences inside your document.

An Accessible PDF document needs a specified reading order that tells Assistive technology in which order contents should be read. However, visual layout does not necessarily dictate reading order, as seen in this video.

For certain complex data tables, Row and Column headers may not provide enough information to assistive technologies. In these cases, the Headers attribute can be added with Acrobat 9 Professional.