Scanned Documents and Bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat

Creating and Managing Bookmarks

Bookmarks provide a persistent navigation panel in Acrobat and most PDF readers. They should be added to documents that are nine or more pages long or that contain multiple distinct sections benefiting from quick navigation.

When to Add Bookmarks

Bookmarks are particularly valuable for:

• Long policy documents, reports, or guides
• Documents with distinct sections that users are likely to return to repeatedly
• Documents where the table of contents alone does not provide sufficient navigation

Generating Bookmarks from Heading Structure

If the PDF has a properly tagged heading structure, bookmarks can be generated from those headings using the Bookmarks panel:

1. Open the Bookmarks panel from the left toolbar
2. Click the options menu (the three dots or ellipsis at the top of the panel)
3. Select New Bookmarks from Structure
4. In the dialog, select the heading levels you want to include — for most documents, Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 are sufficient
5. Click OK

Review the resulting bookmark hierarchy and confirm it matches the document's heading structure before publishing.

Creating Bookmarks Manually

To add a bookmark manually:

1. Navigate to the page or location you want to bookmark
2. Open the Bookmarks panel (View > Show/Hide > Navigation Panes > Bookmarks)
3. Click the New Bookmark icon at the top of the panel
4. Name the bookmark clearly
5. Right-click the bookmark and select Properties to adjust the destination if needed

To create a hierarchy, drag bookmarks beneath a parent bookmark to create sub-bookmarks that reflect the document's heading structure.

Running OCR on Scanned Documents

Scanned PDFs are images — they contain:

• no text

• no tags

• no accessible structure. Optical character recognition (OCR) converts the image of text into actual text that screen readers can access. OCR is a necessary first step for scanned documents, but it does not produce an accessible PDF on its own — tagging, reading order verification, and error correction are still required after OCR.

Accessing the OCR Tool

1. Go to All Tools > Scan & OCR
2. Select Recognize Text
3. Choose In This File to process the current document

Set the language to match the document's primary language before running OCR — this improves recognition accuracy.

Reviewing OCR Results

After OCR runs, review the document carefully. Common error types include:

• Misread characters, particularly in unusual fonts, low-contrast text, or damaged pages
• Numbers and punctuation frequently substituted or dropped
• Table content recognized as plain text with no structural relationship between cells
• Multi-column content merged into a single unstructured text flow

Use All Tools > Scan & OCR > Correct Recognized Text to find and fix recognition errors. Acrobat highlights suspected errors — click each one to correct the text.

After correcting recognition errors, the document still requires full accessibility remediation — tagging, reading order verification, heading structure, and alt text — before it meets accessibility standards. See the other sections on this page for those steps.