Accessible Papers

ACM publications are read (and reviewed) by many people. Making your paper accessible will help to promote the equal participation of people with disabilities in science and engineering. This note describes how to check if your PDF is accessible, and how to fix the most common accessibility problems. For more information, please refer to Adobe’s accessibility resource centre and also WebAIM’s PDF Accessibility resources. 

How do I test if my PDF is accessible?

  1. The document should be tagged. In Adobe Acrobat Pro: Go to the ‘File’ menu. ‘Document properties’. ‘Description’ tab. Look for ‘Tagged PDF: Yes’ among the set of advanced properties. If you do not have access to Adobe Acrobat, try selecting some text in the PDF and pasting it into a text editor. If you can’t do this or the text looks wrong, chances are your document is not readable by a screen reader.
  2. Check the accessibility. In Adobe Acrobat Pro: Go to the ‘Advanced’ menu. ‘Accessibility’. ‘Full Check’. The checker will report accessibility problems.
  3. Fonts should be embedded, or your PDF will need to be regenerated, and you may lose accessibility that you have added. In Adobe Acrobat Pro: Go to the ‘File’ menu. ‘Document properties’. ‘Fonts ‘tab. All of the fonts should have the word ‘embedded’ in parentheses after the font name (unless they are not visible in the final document).

How do I fix accessibility problems?

Word users should correct as many problems as possible in the Word source file rather than the PDF, as described in the next section. LaTeX users will need to edit the PDF directly using Adobe Acrobat Pro. A better basic PDF may be produced by using latex2pdf rather than ps2pdf. See also the WebAim PDF Accessibility primer, which provides information for OpenOffice users.

The accessibility checker in Adobe Acrobat Pro helps fix many accessibility problems. Please see Adobe’s best practices for detailed instructions covering different versions of Adobe Acrobat.

Accessible PDFs include but are not limited to the following characteristics:

  1. Document structure tags and proper reading order
  2. Alternative text for images and other non-text elements (for complex images such as graphs, please make sure that you have long descriptions in an appendix, and are excluded from page count like references)
  3. No reliance on colour alone to convey meaning 
  4. Searchable text
  5. Document language and title indication
  6. Fonts that allow characters to be extracted to text
  7. Readable and accessible complex structures, such as tables
  8. Other interactive features — hyperlinks and navigational aids

You can use Acrobat to create accessible PDFs and check the accessibility of existing PDFs. On these pages, you will find detailed instructions for creating accessible PDFs.

Creating an accessible PDF directly from Word

ACM SIGACCESS provides detailed instructions for creating an accessible ACM Submission.  Create an accessible ACM submission using Microsoft Word. It offers step-by-step instructions for adding basic accessibility information to a Word document on a PC, then exporting it to a PDF intended for ACM.