To a screen reader, a scanned PDF is silent — an image of words it cannot speak. Millions of people navigate documents through assistive technology, and whether your PDF works for them comes down to a few structural properties.
Property one: real text
Everything starts with a text layer. Scans have none; running them through OCR creates one, making the document searchable and speakable at once — the OCR workflow covers it. Test any PDF in seconds: if you can select and copy the text, a screen reader can read it.
Property two: structure and order
Headings let assistive tech users jump through a document the way sighted readers skim. The cheapest way to get structural PDFs is to author with real heading styles in Word and convert via Word to PDF, rather than bolding text manually. Multi-column layouts should read in a sensible order — something worth checking by selecting through the page.
Property three: visual clarity
Low-contrast text excludes low-vision readers; color-only distinctions (see the caution in the grayscale guide) exclude colorblind ones. Descriptive link text (“download the 2026 schedule,” not “click here”) helps everyone. None of this requires special software — just authoring habits and a conversion pipeline that preserves text, which local tools like PDF to Word respect by design.