Help sheet for Accessible PDF

Author: Andy McMahon Alternative Formats Manager

Create an accessible PDF (advanced editing)

PDF – In Depth Formatting

If an accessible PDF is required then more formatting & corrections are required than in the basic PDF.

Abby FineReader will automatically draw a label box on a scanned page to represent what it believes to be:

text (green box) a picture/diagram (red

box) a table (blue box)

When creating a more accessible document you need to go through and make sure that Abbyy has labeled everything correctly (it is around 80-95% accurate).

Stage 1 Re-labeling text as text

This seems pedantic but in many instances if there is a whole page of text then ABBYY will label it all as one text box. While this is technically correct we want to change it so that each paragraph is labeled as an individual text box.

To re-select text do:

Select the exiting box(es) and click delete Click on the text icon in Abbyy

& draw a new box around a chuck(paragraph size of text

Repeat until all areas of text have been identified

The reason for this is when you export the text into a PDF document and activates the “Read out loud” function it will read out all the text at once if it sees it as one big text box. By labeling it as separate text boxes the student can more easily select and choose which chunks of text they want the computer to read out loud to them.

Stage 2 -Correcting text errors

When scanning in, recognition error can occur; you will need to fix them. To do this select do:

Right click read on the task bar In the right hand panel read

through the text, errors ate usually highlighted in blue Manually correct the errors You may need to add additional text

Problems correcting text errors - In some instances, there will be characters and symbols in the image that are not in the systems database so it does not recognize them as text. The best solution here is to tag those individual files as pictures, by clicking and dragging a picture box round them, rather than a text box. The reason we do this will become clear shortly.

Correcting picture/diagram errors

In the picture above, ABBYY has recognized some of the pictures as tables (as it has put them in a blue box). To fix this, follow these steps.To re-select text do:

Select the exiting box(es) and click delete Click on the Picture icon in

Abbyy & draw a new box around each miss- recognized picture

Repeat until all pictures have been identified

Read orderA computer reads the text out in the order the textbox/picture/table was created. This is often incorrect and a visually impaired person relies on the text to be read out in order.

To apply a correct order: Select the order button Now click each box in

order. We always start by clicking on the page number, even if it is at the end

Once you have scanned a chapter, save as a accessible PDF

To save a accessible PDF. Select the drop black down arrow, and select Save as PDF document {NB the icon may be a MS Word, PDF or other icon depending on the last user}

Then click options icon {Spanner icon}

Make sure!o Save mode is > text &

Pictures o Keep headers and

footerso Create outlineo Enable Tagged

PDF(……Adobe Acrobat 5.0 and above)

o Image Settings (best quality)

o Click ok Click on the PDF icon, if

asked read a page click ok. Save to l:\books{book name}\3-Accessible PDF\{chapter}

o Save the PDF as book name - chapter