Documents in electronic format are easier to distribute and are more accessible for students, especially students with disabilities. A scanned document is not inherently accessible, and one must take certain steps to ensure that the scan is high quality to make remediation smoother. A poor scan can also negatively impact students’ experiences, whether they have a disability or not. There are options you can select that will make a scan easier to make accessible. Keep in mind that even if all these precautions are taken, the resulting PDF will still need to be accessed for any remaining accessibility issues and remediated afterwards in Adobe Acrobat.


Setting up a Scan for Success

Utilize a “clean” and clear high quality source material for scans. For example, do not utilize a scan of a scan of a scan as this will decrease the clarity of the image and make it more difficult to be accessible. Scanning an image will not increase its clarity.


High quality scans should avoid the following:

  • Cut off text
  • Crooked, warped, or tilted pages
  • Shadows from the curvature in a book’s spine
  • Poor Contrast
  • Handwriting, highlighting, or Underlining
  • Any marks or stains
  • Any blurred information


Settings on Scanner

Follow some of the settings below to ensure a high-quality scan to not only make it easier for your students to access, but to make it easier to remediate for full accessibility.


Change the DPI (Dots Per Inch)

Change the settings to increase the DPI (dots per inch) level to 300 or higher. The scanner automatically is set at 200, which is of lower quality. Increasing the DPI will ensure that there are more ink droplets that are tightly put together, making the information clearer.


Add OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the Document

Whenever you scan a document, it will convert it to an image and will not recognize the text. However, the scanners at KU have an option to recognize images of text as text using OCR (optical character recognition). This will allow the text to be able to be copied, pasted, searchable, and read aloud by text-to-speech software like screen readers. You must enable these settings by checking off the OCR box or selecting it to be converted into a DOCX file or Word document.


Change to Higher Contrast

You can increase the contrast on a scan to make it sharper and more defined, which can enhance the visibility of key details in the document and make it easier to remediate for accessibility.


During the Scanning Process

When you are in the process of scanning your document, please do the following:

  • When scanning books with a spine, push the spine of the book down while scanning to ensure that the text is copied in a clear manner and prevents the text from appearing warped.
  • Do not combine pages. Ensure that only one physical page is on one electronic page, as this will make it easier to navigate and remediate to be fully accessible.


Difficulty Sending/Receiving the Scanned Document

Depending on the size of your document, changing these settings may make the file too large to be able to be sent to you directly via email. If this occurs, insert a USB drive into the USB port on the scanner and save the document to the USB drive.