THE IMPORTANCE OF READABLE PDFS

There are a lot of accessibility considerations for Word documents and PDFs. We'll look at those considerations in much more depth in Step 8: Structure Word Documents and PDFs for Accessibility. However, there's one aspect of document accessibility that is so important, it deserved its own standalone step higher in the list: Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

PDF documents, especially in higher education, are often scans of physical artifacts, such as a book or journal article. When you scan a document as a PDF, though, that text is not selectable, searchable, or editable unless it has OCR applied to it. This means that users of assistive technologies cannot access the content at all, significantly harming their experience of your course.

Important Note

While your students could also run OCR on documents, don't assume you can just leave this step to students to complete. As the instructor, you should do everything possible to ensure equal access to course materials.

Any documents that were originally digital (such as a Word document or PowerPoint) then later converted to a PDF should have OCR already. It's the scanned images you need to be concerned about.

To check if your PDF has OCR applied, open it and try to select or search the text. In Adobe Acrobat, press Ctrl+F (Windows) or Cmd+F (Mac) to open the "Find" bar. If you are able to search for specific words you know are there, your text has OCR applied. If you cannot find them, then you will need to apply OCR. Thankfully, that is a quick and easy process.

Scanned documents that are low quality or difficult to read are more likely to have OCR errors. Try going back to the original document and getting a higher quality scan.

ONE CLICK TO MAKE YOUR PDF READABLE

Turning a non-readable PDF into a readable one only takes one click. Just open the document in Adobe Acrobat, then select "Edit PDF" from the tools sidebar. If your document isn't readable, it will automatically run OCR. Then, you can test it by searching for a word you know is in the document.

After running OCR with "Edit PDF," make sure to save the new document (File > Save as).

Tools sidebar in Adobe Acrobat with Edit PDF selected

Quick Recap

Run OCR on any scanned PDFs by selecting "Edit PDF" in Adobe Acrobat.

Further Reading