Adobe Express

The ELT archives

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Blast from the past!

Exploring Learning Technologies was a group of instructional technologists and instructional designers at Ohio State who would meet monthly to talk about emerging technologies and popular instructional design tools. Here’s a list of archived ELT meeting information. Some include videos about the learning technologies discussed.

5/10/21: Take a Good Look Around with ELT
3/4/21: Flying High with ELT – covering working with drones
3/27/21: ELT: Power Automate
11/1/19: ELT: Getting Started with Adobe Character Animator
11/1/19: ELT: PowerPoint Unleashed
7/19/19 ELT: Getting Started with Web Annotation – covering Hypothes.is
6/21/19 ELT: Getting Started with H5P
4/17/19 ELT: Quality Assurance in Course Design
3/15/25 Podcasting Mini-Conference
2/7/19: A Closer Look at Transcription Services
1/18/19: Creating Video Discussions with Flipgrid – with Matt Yauk
9/4/18: ELT: Getting Started with the Padcaster
8/13/18: All Things Photography
6/11/18: ODEE Mixed Bag  – coving Turnitin, Proctorio, and the new Carmen Quizzing tool
5/18/18: ELT: All Things VR
3/28/18: A Closer Listen: Getting the Best Audio for your Project
3/28/18: Canvas Potpourri
3/8/17: Easier, Accessible, Better: Digital Book Publishing with Pressbooks
1/26/17: ELT: Getting to Know the Oculus Rift – at CETE at 1900 Kenny Road

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro to make PDF output from design software accessible

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Various design software applications today offer amazing design features but sometimes fall short in supporting document accessibility in not producing tagged PDFs. Fortunately, we can use Adobe Acrobat Pro to check our PDFs for accessibility and remediate problems.

Here are some steps to take in Adobe Acrobat Pro after exporting a PDF from your design software:

  • First run the accessibility checker in Acrobat Pro by clicking ‘Prepare for accessibility’ and then ‘Check for accessibility’. A list of issues comes up in the accessibility panel on the right.
    Screenshot of the accessibility checker settings in Adobe Acrobat
  • Some design applications don’t produce tagged PDFs so in Acrobat Pro you’ll need to right-click on the ‘tagged PDF failed’ issue and choose ‘Fix’. After the tagging process, you’ll notice other issues in the PDF.
    Screenshot of where to launch the checker in Adobe Acrobat and the checker settings
  • For missing alt text issues, you can right-click on the issue and choose ‘Fix’. A box pops up allowing you to add alt text to each figure that is missing it. The alt text should relate to the purpose of the image rather than be a complete description of everything in the photo. Try to keep the alt text brief to around 125 characters. If the image is just a decoration instead of meaningful content, check the ‘Decorative figure’ box.
    Screenshot of fixing a missing alt text issue in the Acorbat accessibility panel results.
  • While a lot of issues have an easy ‘Fix’ option, for some more complex you’ll need to do some research about how to fix and may need to modify things in the tags panel. For example, you may see a ‘heading nesting failed error’ that will require finding headings in the tags panel and updating them to the appropriate heading level to fit the document structure. If a heading skipped levels to be an <H3>, you could change it to be an <H2> in the tags panel, fixing the issues.
  • If you encounter a PDF with a lot of complex tag structure issues, be sure to save a copy of your original document so if the tag structure gets broken you have a backup to start over with.
  • Save your remediated PDF.

You can learn more about PDF document accessibility and remediating PDFs in the PDF accessibility BuckeyeLearn courses. While you can remediate accessibility issues in Acrobat Pro, it’s best to fix issues in the original source document created by your design software if it supports correcting the issues. Companies are adding new features supporting accessibility in new versions of thier software. Check with your software vendor to see if they are planning to release new features supporting document accessibility.

Using Acrobat to make a PDF output from Adobe Express accessible

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Adobe Express is a great product with lots of useful and amazing design features. Unfortunately, it doesn’t currently produce tagged PDFs, so you’ll need to do some work in Adobe Acrobat Pro to make your PDF document fully accessible.

You can find out more about using Adobe Express itself at: https://it.osu.edu/adobe/

Here are some steps to take in Acrobat after exporting a PDF from Express:

  • First run the accessibility checker in Acrobat Pro by clicking ‘Prepare for accessibility’ and then ‘Check for accessibility’. A list of issues comes up in the accessibility panel on the right.Screenshot of where to launch the checker in Adobe Acrobat and the checker settings
  • Express doesn’t produce tagged PDFs so in Acrobat Pro you’ll need to right-click on the ‘tagged PDF failed’ issue and choose ‘Fix’. After the tagging process, you’ll notice other issues in the PDF.
    Screenshot of fixing the Tagged PDF Failed issue in the Acorbat accessibility panel results.
  • For missing alt text issues, you can right-click on the issue and choose ‘Fix’. A box pops up allowing you to add alt text to each figure that is missing it. The alt text should relate to the purpose of the image rather than be a complete description of everything in the photo. Try to keep the alt text brief to around 125 characters. If the image is just of decoration instead of meaningful content, check the ‘Decorative figure’ box.
    Screenshot of fixing a missing alt text issue in the Acorbat accessibility panel results.
  • While a lot of issues have an easy ‘Fix’ option, for some more complex you’ll need to do some research about how to fix and may need to modify things in the tags panel. For example, you may see a ‘heading nesting failed error’ that will require finding headings in the tags panel and updating them to the appropriate heading level to fit the document structure. If a heading skipped levels to be an <H3>, you could change it to be an <H2> in the tags panel, fixing the issues.
  • If you encounter a PDF with a lot of complex tag structure issues, be sure to save a copy of your original document so if the tag structure gets broken you have a backup to start over with.
  • Save your remediated PDF.

There is some more information about accessibility and Adobe Express in their VPAT. Hopefully in future versions additional accessibility improvements will be introduced. It would be great if a built-in accessibility checker can be added, similar to the one in MS Office applications and Adobe Acrobat. It would also be good to introduce an easy way to add alt text to images similar to what is available in Word and PowerPoint. Adding features like that would help Adobe Express stand out from competing products like Canva. For now, we’ll need to rely on using Acrobat to add accessibility to our Express PDFs.

You can learn more about PDF document accessibility in the PDF accessibility BuckeyeLearn courses.

Resources

Need more information about using Adobe Express?

Don’t have access to Acrobat Pro? Here are some other PDF apps that include accessibility checkers: