How-To: Use the Adobe Acrobat Tags Tree

The Adobe Acrobat Tag Tree is an important tool for document remediation, as it shows all the tags that are used in a document. Tags organize different types of content such as headings, body text, figures, lists, tables and more. Correctly defining content types into appropriate tags is essential for screen reader accessibility. These instructions will help you to understand the basics of the Tag Tree and will begin to familiarize you with some common tags.

Key Takeaways

PDF tags provide the document structure that is accessed by screen readers.
Learn how to access the Tags Tree in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Explore common document tags and their uses.

Access the Tags Tree

These instructions are for the newest version interface of Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Step 1: Open a PDF in the Adobe Acrobat Pro application

Make sure to open a PDF in the application and not in the browser version of Acrobat.

Step 2: Open the Tags Panel

Select the hamburger menu in the upper left corner, then hover over “View” then “Show/Hide” then “Side panels” and finally, select “Accessibility tags.” This will add the “Accessibility tags” tool to the vertical menu bar on the right hand side of the screen.

Screenshot of the Acrobat menu showing the steps to open the Accessibility tags panel.

Step 3: Review and Remediate

If you have designed your document to be accessible within the source file and exported the file correctly to PDF, then the Tags Tree may be mostly correct. However, depending on how complicated your original document is and if the original document was created with accessibility in mind, considerable remediation may be required to make sure that content is tagged correctly and listed in the correct order. Tags should be moved, added, deleted, and edited as needed to make sure that screen reader users can access all the document contents.

Understanding the Tag Names

There are over thirty different tags available in Adobe Acrobat, the full list of which can be found on the Acrobat website, or else listed in a drop down list in Acrobat when adding a new tag.

Common Tags

Some of the most common tags include:

<P>: the paragraph element is used for regular body text.
<H1> through <H6>: the heading levels 1-6 elements are available as six separate tags in Adobe Acrobat. Use the correct level following the standard rules for heading levels: make sure there is one Heading Level 1 per document, that headings are properly nested, and that the tag assignment corresponds with the level of heading the original document was designed to be using.
<Figure>: the figure tag is used for images, logos, and other graphic elements that are placed within documents. Figures should either be given alternative text or be marked as decorative.

Lists and Tables

Lists and tables are two types of content that include several types of tags that work together to represent a single content type. Lists and tables both begin with a container tag and then have other related tags nested within.

Lists

Lists can be made up from four primary tags.

<L>: the list element is a container that has other list-related elements nested within.
<LI>: the list item element is both nested inside of the list element, and it is a container to other tags beneath. The list body element should be nested within the list item element. If you are using the label element tag, which is optional, it should also be nested within the list item element before the list body element.
<Lbl>: the label element is used as a tag for the bullet point or marker for list items. It is not necessary, but it can be useful in organizing list content and may appear automatically depending on which word processing program was used to create the document.
<LBody>: the list body element is also a nested tag within the list item element. This tag contains the content of the list item. There should be a separate list body element for each piece of the list.

Screenshot of the Acrobat Accessibility tags panel showing a List Body tag and a Label tag nested inside a List Item tag, which is nested inside a List tag.

Tables

Tables can be made up from several containers and nested tags.

<Table>: the table element, comparable to the list element, is the first tag for a table and it contains other table tags nested inside of it.
<TR>: the table row element is used to define each row within a table. The table row element is nested inside of the Table element and should only contain two possible elements: <TH> and <TD>.
<TH>: the table header cell element is used to tag the cells in header rows and/or header columns.
<TD>: the table data cell element is used to tag the contents of the rest of the cells in a table that are regular cells, not header cells.

Container Tags

Some tags are just used as containers for other tags to break up documents into sections. The only container tag that is necessary to use in each document is the document tag, stylized as <Document>, which should be the first item in the tags tree and all other tags should be nested inside of it. The other possible container tags, which are all optional, include the part element (stylized as <Part>), the division element (stylized as <Div>), the article element (stylized as <Art>), and the section element (stylized as <Sect>). These container tags may appear in Acrobat automatically depending on what source application you used to create the original file. You can also manually add these container tags when adding or remediating tags to separate content into different areas.