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Learn how Poonam Mehta, senior Physiotherapy lecturer from the Graduate School of Health, made PDFs accessible for a student with low vision.
Academics in focus
Poonam Mehta, senior Physiotherapy lecturer at the Graduate School of Health, utilised SensusAccess and OCR on Adobe to convert inaccessible PDFs for her subject 96085 Outpatient Rehabilitation.
The access requirement
The student experiences vision loss and is unable to read small text. They use assistive technology called a screen reader, where the student highlights text and it is read out loud to them.
The learning context
This subject contained multiple PDFs, most of which were inaccessible to the student and their screen reader. Some of these PDFs contained images or were scanned/handwritten documents, making them unreadable by the screen reader as the student could not highlight the content.
The solution
To enhance the accessibility of the PDFs were converted into accessible formats using one or both of the following programs SensusAccess and OCR on Adobe.
Steps to convert an inaccessible PDF using SensusAccess:
SensusAccess instantly converts scanned documents (including those with handwritten text) into highlightable text, and turns any handwritten text into typed text.
- Select your Source – either File, Text or URL.
- Upload the inaccessible PDF.
- Select your target format – either MP3 audio, Braille, E-book or Accessibility conversion (e.g. doc, rtf, pdf (tagged), xls, csv, txt or html).
- Enter your email address and submit request.
The converted document should be sent to your inbox within an hour.
Steps to convert an inaccessible PDF using OCR in Adobe Acrobat:
OCR on Adobe instantly converts scanned documents (including those with handwritten text) into highlightable text.
Steps:
- Open your selected PDF file in Acrobat.
- Click on ‘All tools’ in the left pane.
- Select ‘Scan & OCR’.
- Under the subheading ‘Recognise text’, select ‘In this file’.
- Choose specific pages or all pages in the drop-down menu, select a language if necessary.
- Then click on ‘Recognise text’.
- Wait for the system to complete the conversion.
- Remember to double check the document with the screen reader the student uses as some mistakes do occur (e.g. Spoken Content on Mac involves highlighting the text and then selecting “Option + Escape”).
Be mindful that using both tools might be needed for some PDFs which are more complex:
In another Physiotherapy subject, an academic utilised both SensusAccess and OCR. In this case, OCR was unable to capture all the text. The PDF was uploaded to SensusAccess twice: first for a Word doc, which missed some text, and then for a Text file, which successfully captured the remaining text. The content was then copied into a Word doc and then cross-referenced with the original PDF.
Future considerations
Things to consider in general
Accessible PDFs are critical for students with low vision but can benefit all students. It’s important to consider accessibility from the initial stages of building your course site. In this case, sourcing accessible materials such as highlightable PDFs, or Word documents or other alternatives, makes the accessibility enhancement process easier and improves the accessibility of your content. Check out this LX resource on Accessible formats: reasonable adjustments for more detail on sourcing and creating accessible formats.
What to consider when making enhancements for a student with low vision
It is important to work directly with the individual and get their input. An accessible format to one person, might be different to another. Therefore, when meeting an access requirement, be specific, in addition to testing where possible. For instance, testing the document with the student’s screen reader to ensure compatibility, as it may not function correctly with all screen readers.