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Acrobat Tutorial:
Adding Actual Text to Bullet Glyphs.
Using a unique bullet for lists can be very effective for sighted users.
But those who use screen readers or text-to-speech technologies might get an earful of "Black Right-Pointing Triangle" gibberish instead of "Bullet."
Here’s how to correct that in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Since Adobe InDesign and MS Office don't allow us to put actual text on these special "bullet" glyphs, assistive technologies attempt to voice the formal name of the glyph, like "Black Right-Pointing Triangle" (►) or "Upper Right Drop-Shadowed White Square."(❒).
Gah! What an earful of repetitive gibberish for those who listen to PDF documents.
Note: accessibility requires Actual Text on the bullet characters, not Alt Text.
1. Correct this in Adobe Acrobat Pro
You'll need a recent copy of Acrobat Pro on your computer to quickly correct the shortcoming and add Actual Text to all bullet gyphs, regardless of how they appear.
- From Acrobat's Standards Panel, select Preflight and then PDF Standards from the top drop-down menue
- Select the Profiles tab.
- Select the blue wrench at the top. (Careful, this panel has more than one blue wrench icon and each performs a different task.)
- Under the Document section, select "Set labels in unordered lists."
- To execute the utility, click the Fix blue wrench in the lower right of the panel.
That's all it takes to correct all the glyphs in all the bulleted lists in your PDF file. So quick!
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