From the course: Creating Accessible PDFs

Acrobat Pro DC setup and workspace

From the course: Creating Accessible PDFs

Acrobat Pro DC setup and workspace

- [Instructor] When remediating PDF files using Adobe Acrobat Pro, there are some specific tools and panels that are found in Acrobat that we'll be using specifically to make PDF files accessible. In this video, I'd like to walk you through my setup process so that all the elements that we'll be using are readily available to you throughout the process. I'm simply using this document as an example, but you can use any PDF file to follow along. Now the first thing we're going to do, is over here to the right, is our list of tools that are available inside of Adobe Acrobat, and there's actually an Accessibility tool that we want to make available over here. So if you come up here, to the upper left corner of your screen, and click on Tools, we're going to scroll down to the Protect and Standardize category, where, all the way at the very end, you're going to find an Accessibility tool. And below that icon, you should see the Add button. And if you click that button, you're going to notice that now there's a new tool, over here to the right, that is the Accessibility tool. And, if you wish, you can click on that and drag it. I'm going to move mine all the way up to the top, that way it's front and center and ready for me to access when I want to. Now what we can do is click back on the Document tab, up here, and the other thing that we're going to add is a couple of navigation panes. Now your navigation panes are located over here, on the left side of yer screen. You'll notice there's a small triangle right here, I'm going to click on that to open up my navigation pane. Now, right now, there's not much in there, but what we're going to do is I'm going to right-click in this empty area below these icons, and it's going to give me a list of the other available navigation panes that we can display. So the first one I'm going to choose is the Content pane, and by selecting that you can see that now there's a new button over here in the list, which is for the Content pane. I'm going to right-click again, and I'm going to choose Order to open up my order pane, and, finally, I'm going to right-click again, and I'm going to choose Tags. So these three navigation panes, you're going to be leveraging pretty regularly during the PDF remediation process to look at tags in your document, make adjustments, and also fix issues in your documents. Now I'm going to go ahead and click on the Tags button to just kind of close that, and this next thing is not really an accessibility-specific thing, but I find it really useful for being able to navigate through a document. And what I'm going to do, up here you'll notice that we have an up arrow and a down arrow which will take me to the previous or next page. I'm going to right-click on one of those buttons, and I'm going to go to Show Page Navigation, and I'm going to choose First Page. I'm going to right-click again, and choose Show Page Navigation Tools, and choose Last Page. And what that does is gives me an icon to quickly jump to the last page of the document or to the very first page of the document. And I'm going to add two more here. I'm going to right-click, choose Show Page Navigation. I also like to show my Previous View button as well as my Next View button. And I find this to be very helpful for, say, when I'm on page eight and I need to jump to page 20, I can now use the Previous View button to go back to page eight, or use the Next View button to go back to page 20. So those are the elements that you're going to be leveraging throughout this course. And now that you've customized the Acrobat Pro interface to facilitate the PDF remediation process, you're ready to follow along in the rest of the chapters of this course and learn how to make PDF documents accessible for all users.

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