Portable Document Format (PDF) is a widely used file type because it maintains a consistent layout across software applications, hardware, and operating platforms. Downloadable journal articles from Pitt’s University Library System are always in PDF form. Chances are that many of the readings you assign to your students will be in PDF form as well. PDFs can be opened on PCs and Macs as well as a wide variety of mobile devices.
Readability of PDFs is made possible when optical character recognition (OCR) functionality is applied to files. OCR functionality ensures that text in a PDF file is searchable and readable by a screen reader. PDFs created from poor quality photocopies or saved as images without OCR are not accessible to students who use screen readers because the content on the PDF page is viewed as an image instead of text. Unreadable PDFs are created when you use a scanner, copier, or software that does not have OCR capabilities.
Once you have an OCR version of a PDF, readability can be further increased by applying appropriate tags within your document. PDF tags provide metadata that help a screen reader user understand the structure of a document. Tags can be applied to elements in a document such as headings, columns, and images.
If you create a document in MS Word and convert it later into a PDF file, appropriately applied MS Word styles will be changed into PDF tags during the conversion. The use of styles in MS Word is, therefore, always recommended to identify headings, tables, and other elements within an MS Word document. Whether you convert your Word document into a PDF file or leave it as a Word document, screen reading software will be able to make use of the metadata in either format.