How to facilitate the creation of accessible PDFs
In order to facilitate your work on creating accessible PDFs, we suggest the following procedure:
1) Find out if the material is available in an electronic format other than PDF (e.g. Word, WordPerfect, etc). If yes, then use the material to create an Accessible PDF.
2) Ask a professor directly whether he/she has access to
an electronic version of the material.
If she has an electronic format other than PDF, then use the material to create
an Accessible PDF.
If the electronic format is a PDF, first check the level of accessiblity of
it, and then retrofit the PDF if needed.
3) If the material is not available in electronic format, look for a hard copy of the document. If a good quality hard copy is available, you will most likely have to import the document from a scanner. The problem is that creating a PDF using a scanner will create an image only document that is not accessible for people using assistive technology.
In order for users of assistive technology to be able to access the contents of a scanned image, it must first be run through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scan, which will convert the image file to text (e.g. real-text). In order to perform this function using Acrobat Professional 6.0, you can use the "paper capture" function. This technology allows users to scan their images for legible text.