Lab: Forms in PDF
Objective:
In this lab, you will learn how to:
- Take an existing form and make an electronic version of it.
- Make form elements accessible.
Pre-requisites:
A basic working knowledge of Acrobat.
Time to Complete:
30 minutes
Files:
EmploymentForm.pdf
(
, 55 KB )
Version Information:
Acrobat 9.0
Creating Tags Root
To begin:
- Download and open the EmploymentForm.pdf using Acrobat.
You can see it is a standard form that requires a little information
from the applicant. The first thing we need to see is the structure of
the document.
To see the structure of the document:
- Go to the View menu.
- Choose Navigation Panels, then Tags. This opens the Tags window (see Image
27).
Because this document contains
no structure, you need to begin by creating a Tags Root. This is a high-level
tag that all other tags will be contained in.
To create a tags root:
- Select the Options drop down in the tags window.
- Select 'Create Tags Root'. You should now see a root tag that has
no child elements.
Creating Tags for the Text
Now that we have a Tags Root, start inserting the elements
into the tree.
To create the title of the form within the tree:
- Choose the 'Select Text Tool'.
- Select the title text. In this case, the 'Anti-Trust Security Systems
Employment Application'.
- From the Tags drop down menu in the tags window, choose 'Create tag from Selection'.
A 'New Tag' dialogue box appears (see Image
28). Choose the type of tag you want and give it a title.
You have now added the text to the tree; you
can see this by selecting the plus next to the Tags Root.
Creating Accessible Forms
Now you have to add the electronic form element. You will
be giving the form a text equivalent.
To add the electronic form :
- Click the Forms button on the toolbar, then 'Add or Edit Fields.' This displays the form hierarchy on the left side, and you are now ready to edit them.
- Right click the form you want to edit from the hierarchy on the left, and select 'Properties.'(see Image
29).
- In the dialog box, under the general tab, enter a name and a short description. Make
sure the description ends with a period so sentences do not
run together.
- Change other options, such as under the appearance tag, the size should
not be auto; for this example choose 12. Also, under the options tag,
you may want to change the alignment to Left and deselect all the checkboxes.
Adding the Form to the Tag Tree
The last step in working with the form is to add it to the tag
hierarchy so it will be exposed to the screen reader. To do this,
you can have Adobe find it for you.
To add the form to the Tag tree:
- In the Tag Window, select 'Find'. This opens the 'Find Element' dialog box (see Image
30).
- Choose 'Unmarked Annotations' from the dropdown menu.
- Select 'Find Next'.
- You will see in the dialogue box that that it has found your form
element. We now need to fill in the information for it.
- Click 'Tag Element' In the 'Type' field, choose form.
- In the Title field, give it a name. This description will be displayed in the Tag tree,
but will not be read by the screen reader.
- Click OK. You should now see that your form
element has been inserted into the tree.
To pull up these settings again, you can right-click
on the form element to bring up the dialog box again. Also, if you ever
need to remove something from the tree, you can right-click then delete
the element.
You will now want to repeat the above process for all the
elements in the form, making sure that all the form elements have text descriptions,
and also that they have been inserted into the tag tree (see Image
31).
The accessible PDF form should look like the Image
32; review the differences in how the accessible form should read.
The next page discusses testing PDF documents for accessibility.
,
128 KB)
,
1 KB).
College of Architecture (COA)
PDF
Lab: Forms in PDF
Image 27
Previous Page
