Prep the Original Document

If you are having problems making a PDF accessible in Adobe Acrobat Professional, revert back to the original document from which the PDF was created from.

If possible, tag the original document before you convert it to a PDF.

If the original document's software has a tagging feature, tag the document before converting to a PDF.

Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional comes with a plug-in for Microsoft Office(Word, Excels, and Access) that tags the document as you convert it to PDF. This feature only works on Windows not Macintosh.


If using InDesign CS2 and up, follow these steps

1. Go to View>Structure>Show Structure.
2. In the Structure panel, click on the arrow at the top and click on "Add Untagged Items". Now everything is tagged

But you might have to manually reorder some of the tags around and tag them as (headers, paragraphs, figures, etc.) using the Tag Panel found at Windows>Tags. I am not fully an expert at tagging in InDesign yet, but I will update this post when I have time to figure it out. So far this is a start to getting it tagged.

Sometimes Acrobat Professional will have problems tagging a PDF when the letter-spacing is increased or not set.


Solution:

Open the original document and highlight all the text and set the kerning/letter-spacing to zero. If kerning/letter-spacing is applied to a specific text because of styling reasons skip that text and continue with the rest of the document. Then save as a PDF again.

Sometimes when there is a hyphen at the end of sentence Acrobat Professional reads the word as two separate words.

Solution:

Open the original document and remove hyphens at the end of the lines if possible. And then save as a PDF again.

Or edit the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Standard/Professional using the Tools>Advanced Editing>Touchup Text tool.