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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- You can find out more about using Adobe Express (and other Adobe products) at: https://it.osu.edu/adobe/.
- Or check out this Adobe Express information.