Reference Card for Accessible PDF Creation from Word
There is a lot of PDF that is generated though Adobe's PDFMaker plug-in for Microsoft Word. You can quite easily create PDF documents that meet the majority of accessibility needs with very little effort, if you know how. For the CSUN conference, we created a one-page document that helps guide users who may not know much about accessibility so that they can more easily address accessibility in their documents.
This document doesn't cover every possible issue, but identifies the small number of items that need some attention to avoid the most common issues that authors can prevent. In general, if an author:
- provides equivalents for images in Word
- uses Word's styles to define structural headings
- identifies table headings for simple tables
- uses Word's column feture instead of text boxes, and
- enables the generation of tagged PDF
The results are excellent for most documents created in Word. Yes, you can deviate from this path and need to perform repair work to make a PDF document accessible, but to start I want to ensure that authors know what the path to minimize challenges looks like.
This is a first stab at this document, please let us know what you like, if it is useful to you, or any other comments you may have.
Comments
Superb PDF, Andrew, thanks! I'll be sure to mention it in the Web Axe podcast.
Posted by: Dennis at Web Axe | March 20, 2008 02:58 PM
Thank you so very much for the flash card, a very big card. Extremely helpful for my work and our faculty and staff. I will link to it in my web site soon. I also think Mr Gates should give you guys unlimited free upgrades to his products, if you wanted them that is.
Mei
Posted by: Mei Fang | March 20, 2008 04:43 PM
Excellent. Thanks!!
Posted by: Natalie | March 24, 2008 12:46 PM
Thank you for sharing this quick reference card! Got a copy at the CSUN 2008 conference, and was looking for an electronic version. It is a great resource to share with our content creators.
Posted by: CSUCI | March 24, 2008 05:21 PM
The Reference Card you have provided is enormously helpful. Kudos to all who helped create this resource. I'm seeking clarification about one specific element in the 'Tables' section. The card states to 'repeat header rows' for tables beyond 1 page. However, my experience thus far is that 'repeat header rows' is necessary for PDFMaker to tag a row as a header row during conversion and thus create a tag within the PDF. Thus I recommend always checking this option when the first row is a header row irrespective of whether the table spans more than 1 page. Is this approach incorrect?
Posted by: Mark Turner | March 24, 2008 07:45 PM
Thanks for update which you promised in session. ^*^
By the way, please guide me how to become a trust agent. [FYI], my company develops screen reader for Korean Windows.
Posted by: Chungho Kim | March 28, 2008 04:35 AM
This is great! Thank you.
However (the other shoe drops), my employer (a federal agency) has yet to migrate our office products to any of the versions listed in the Reference Card, and has no plans and no money to do so for the foreseeable future. Has this Reference Card been test using Word 2002 and Acrobat 6 products?
The law requires we create and produce accessible IT products (Section 508). Unfortunately, the law offers no way to do so and it appears, neither does anyone else.
Posted by: Fed Employee | March 28, 2008 11:39 AM
Word XP (Word 2002) and Acrobat 6 can be used with this sheet also, but I'm not sure if the methods for adding equivalents are the same as pictured, and the most significant change is that support for headings for structure was an improvement in Acrobat 7. You should be able to get good use out of it for your older versions, but it is more directly applicable to newer versions of Acrobat's PDFMaker plugin and newer versions of Word. -AWK
Posted by: Andrew Kirkpatrick | March 28, 2008 12:02 PM
Great reference card! Thanks for doing that as I've been meaning to provide that same information to our staff, but couldn't find the time to put it all together.
I'd like to mention that the PDF file size can be reduced from the current 1.2Mb to 794Kb.
Posted by: Kevin Jones | March 31, 2008 11:11 AM
I'm a bit puzzled about how to apply the advice from the Reference Card on a Macintosh running Word 2008. They seem to have done away with PDFmaker (as well as VBA support, so short of coding up calls to distiller with applescript, I don't see how to recreate it). Not that making a PDF is hard (now one can "save as" PDF, but I've been unable to find any controls, so setting metadata or influencing the generation of proper tags eludes me.
Any insights or suggestions?
Thanks in advance.
Posted by: Keith Bierman | April 3, 2008 09:43 PM
Keith, the support for accessible PDF creation in the Mac version of Word and PDFMaker is not the same as on Windows. I'm looking into the exact reasons, but suspect that the DOM in Word for Windows has accessibility information that the Mac version doesn't.
Posted by: Andrew Kirkpatrick | April 14, 2008 08:54 AM
I'm not surprised to hear that Word 2008 on the Mac does not support the conversion settings.
After much research at work, I recently discovered that on Word for Mac 2004, the conversion settings are not available as they are for Word for Windows. Creating an accessible, tagged PDF using Word for Mac does not seem possible, without a lot of manual editing after the PDF is created.
Posted by: Deborah Edwards-Onoro | April 30, 2008 11:38 AM