Automated accessibility checkers cannot catch all accessibility issues in your document, so it is important to perform a final manual check as well. However, reviewing your final PDF doesn’t have to be cumbersome! Three quick accessibility tests are detailed below. Video tutorials by Section508.gov may also be found here.

The “Visual Tag” Audit

A PDF can look perfect, but be completely blank to a screen reader. To check that this will not be the case with your ETD:

1. In the “Find text, tools, or help” search bar toward the top right corner, search “tags” and select “Accessibility tags.”
2. Expand the “Tags” tree.
3. You should see tags like <Document>, <H1>, <H2>, and <P>.
   • If it says “No Tags available,” it means you “Printed to PDF” rather than using the “Save As” or “Export” function. You must re-save your file using the correct process.

Meaningful Alt Text Spot-Check

Automated checkers only verify that alt text exists, not that it is good.

1. In the “Find text, tools, or help” search bar toward the top right corner, search for and select “Set Alternate Text.”
2. Acrobat will cycle through every image in the thesis.
3. Alt text should use visually rich description (e.g., “Line graph showing a 10% increase in GDP from 2010-2020” rather than “Chart,” “Figure 1,” or “image.jpg”).

The Navigation Test

1. In the “Find text, tools, or help” search bar toward the top right corner, search for and select “Bookmarks.”
2. There should be a clickable table of contents here that matches the actual document chapters. If it’s empty, the proper Heading styles were not used in MS Word.