Creating accessible PDFs from Word, Part 1

Transcript

[EMILY BAKER]
Hello and welcome everybody. Today’s live training by the Center for Digital Accessibility is about creating accessible PDFs from Word documents.

Today’s session is being recorded, and once the automatic captions are corrected, we’ll share a link to the video. My name is Emily Baker, and I’m the Senior Digital Accessibility Specialist on the CDA team. We are here to help you strengthen the accessibility of your digital content, and I tend to work with the non-web content such as documents, captioning for videos, et cetera. In this session today, we are going to consider the deceptively simple three-step process for creating an accessible PDF, and then we’ll unpack some of the details lurking there.

We’ll find out what are the elements of an accessible PDF. We’ll walk through the process of creating an accessible Word including some do’s and don’ts. We’ll see how to export that document correctly to the PDF format and if time allows, we’ll execute a few finishing touches using Acrobat Pro in the PDF itself.

So the creation of accessible PDFs seems to be pretty simple at the surface level. Three keys to doing this are to create an accessible source file using your application’s built-in accessibility functionality. Today, obviously that will be Microsoft Word, but for other authoring tools the methods might change, but a lot of the principles will still apply. Then step two is to export it properly to the PDF format.

There are multiple ways to create a PDF from a Word file and some of them do not result in an accessible PDF. Then number three, applying some finishing touches in Acrobat. It seems like no matter what we do, the PDF format is a little bit more persnickety and requires a little bit of extra handling. So we’ll talk about the little tweaks that you need to apply at the end of the process.

Of course, you can use Acrobat Pro or other specialized tools like the Equidox platform to make your PDFs accessible after the fact, but that is literally the worst case scenario. Creating a beautiful document and then trying to add accessibility features at the end of the process is the most difficult and time-consuming way to do it. According to our frenemies at Adobe, these are the basic elements of an accessible PDF. Structure.

Accessible PDFs have proper organization with headings, paragraphs, lists, and tables that assist screen readers in understanding the content flow. Text accessibility, by which they just mean that the text is actual accessible text, not static images or scanned documents, which are not readable by assistive technology. Accessible PDFs facilitate navigation, especially longer PDFs which might contain bookmarks, tables of contents, especially if they’re longer than nine pages, as well as meaningful descriptive hyperlinks.

Also accessible PDFs prioritize color contrast and also provide alternatives for color-coded information, so not using color alone. Interesting that Adobe calls this out because it’s really not convenient at all, might not even be possible to change color. So if you are thinking about using color in your documents, I strongly encourage you to check the contrast of the choices that you’re making and make those adjustments in your source file because it gets really hairy after the fact.

Metadata and language specification. Accessible PDFs include accurate metadata and specify the documents language. These are slightly different characteristics than the characteristics of the content inside the document itself.

So we’ll talk about that in a little bit. Then forms and interactive elements, properly labeled and accessible form fields. I’m gonna park forms and interactive elements a little bit out of scope today because that’s a lot more complicated to do, but forms especially are super complex. Just to give you an idea of what I mean by a lot more complex, professional remediators out there in the world charge about five times more per page to remediate forms than they do for regular straight content.

Also, interestingly, it is not possible to make an accessible fillable form in Word, period. So, out of scope.

If you do need to make forms, alternatives like a web form or a Qualtrics survey I think is a much better bet if you have to have a fillable form. We will talk a little bit about links, which is a different kind of important interactive element, but forms are out.

Then here to the right hand side on this slide, we have some of the things that our enterprise web accessibility platform called Siteimprove is checking for in the PDFs that are posted on websites. By and large, both tools are checking for similar things that are discoverable by automation. Siteimprove interestingly calls out alt text that’s not mentioned in the Adobe list, although it will be checked for by both Microsoft Word and Adobe. But most of these things are the same similar items that are discoverable by automation.

If you think you’ve seen these things before, well, you probably have. PDFs have so many of the same considerations as any other digital content. So check out the CDA web page on our top tips for content creators for a little bit more information about those principles and how they might apply to different content forms.

So many PDFs start out as Word documents, and it turns out that for regular everyday documents, almost everything, almost everything an accessible PDF needs can be created much more easily in your source file. So step one of our simple process before you take step two and export it to the PDF format.

We’re gonna do a live demo in a moment, so wish me luck on this. But first I want to say this little disclaimer. We will use this process to create a usable PDF with no major barriers.

But if you need to pass all the checkpoints in the PDF/UA specification, there will probably be more work for you in Acrobat. So our goal today is not to create a perfect PDF, it is to create a usable PDF with no major accessibility barriers. I want to make an acknowledgment here that I am using a document that is a copy of a sample document used in the LinkedIn Learning courses on accessible PDFs taught by Chad Chelius. I highly recommend them for a deeper dive on all of these techniques.

He has specific guidance for InDesign in addition to Microsoft Word. So these are really great courses and this document just happens to have lots of characteristics that I wanted to talk to you about.

Whoops. I hope you guys are not seeing my little Zoom window. So if you are planning on creating accessible files, number one, use one of the most recent desktop versions of Word. Accessibility functionality will be roughly comparable on Macs and PCs, but it might not be available in the Word online.

The University provides download links to all of those files, so keep them up to date in order to have access to the latest functionality. I’m gonna be using a Mac today.

Again, most of this functionality is gonna be very similar in the PC version. It might be located in a slightly different menu or place.

One of the things that we recommend doing is to keep checking accessibility while you are doing the work. So in the Word preferences menu, I’m beginning to think maybe I won’t be able to show this. Can you see the preferences pop up?

[PAT KOGOS]
Yes.

[EMILY BAKER]
Oh, excellent. I was afraid that might’ve been outside of my share window. In the Word Preferences dialog, the Accessibility area here, you want to verify that ‘Keep Accessibility Checker Running While I Work’ is checked.

[STUDENT ONE]
I’m sorry, can you go back to how you got to this?

[EMILY BAKER]
Sure, absolutely. Again, in the Word, Oops, I guess I have to close out.

Which is also, there we go. My apologies.

So on the Mac, under the Word menu, there will be the Preferences option. You can select that, Word Preferences. On a PC it will behave slightly differently.

I can’t remember exactly how to get to it, but it does look slightly different. Once the Word Preferences dialog is open, you will select Accessibility, and then you’ll see these options. I’m recommending that everybody keep Accessibility checker running while they work. This one is an interesting one.

We’ll talk about it. It’s checked here, ‘Automatically generate all text for me’. You can let it try to generate all text for you.

Just don’t trust it, and we’ll talk about that when we get to that topic in the document. Then ‘Show me options for creating accessible documents’. This is a little preview option, you can turn it off or on. This one is new to me.

It’s interesting and I’ll show you how it works in a minute. But anyway, keep Accessibility checker running while you work.

Then what you’ll also have as an option is in the bottom of the Word document window, Accessibility Investigate so you can invoke the accessibility assistant at any time from here because it’s running while you work, and it’ll give you some guidance. It’ll be checking as you go and it will tell you what you might need to do to fix things.

Another place to find this functionality is in the review tab on the ribbon, the editing ribbon and check accessibility button will open that same Accessibility Assistant. So you have a couple of the different ways to get at this functionality. One of the tidbits of advice, specifically to Word, is to avoid using tables unless you have tabular data to share to share. So certainly don’t use them for layout only.

There are columns and other section configurations that you can use if you are purely looking at layout. But if you have tabular data, there are some things that you can do. I’m gonna scroll ahead, so please don’t get too dizzy, and just jump to page 18. Here we have a table and this is kind of a nice example.

It is a data table, but it’s a simple table so the advice is to simplify your tables as much as possible. Word is a little trickier. You can give these tables reasonable characteristics and export those to PDF format very well, but the more complex your table gets, the more difficult it is to make it accessible. Some considerations for tables here, same as any other piece of content.

You’ll want to choose a table format that gives you sufficient contrast in the foreground and the background, and you need to designate table headers. Usually, that’ll be the top row, the header row, the first row in your table.

That’s telling everyone what kind of data is contained in the cells underneath it. Then sometimes you’ll have a first column or a column header as will be called in PDF format.

So it’s not always used, so you can unselect that or reselect it. You can see if I select it visually, the column header content becomes bold so that you can tell that it’s been designated as the header there. This is important for the relationship of the data to be clear to screen reader users who are gonna navigate these tables in a non-visual way.

Do not use split-cells merged cells or nested tables within tables. That might be necessary occasionally, and it is definitely possible to remediate that in the PDF afterwards, but again, really complex, difficult and time consuming to do. So if you can avoid it, highly recommended.

If you have table data that seems complex, I recommend breaking complex tables into multiple simpler tables if at all possible. Another technique to follow in the Word document, which is very nice, is to use built-in title, subtitle, heading styles.

I’m actually not buying the title style thing when Word says this. But in the style pane of the ribbon, you’ll have options to select all of these different styles. So instead of just visually marking things so that they look like headings, you’ll want to designate them as specific headings. So this is a heading two.

It’s been styled to look a certain kind of way but it’s a heading level two. Here will be a heading level one. So organize your document, use headings to separate your chunks of content and then use the styles pane to mark your headings. Microsoft will give you a title style.

Here’s a little pro tip. The title style does not exist as a type of content in a PDF. So if your Word document is only going to be a Word document, then that’s great. Feel free to use a title style.

If its ultimate destination is the PDF format, and I apologize for the scrolling, I’ve got to go all the way back to page one. I recommend using a heading level one for your title.

The heading level one rule in web content is to only have one heading one on a webpage, but that does not apply in a document context because longer, complex documents like book length files that have chapters and stuff, it makes sense to use heading level one for the title and then for the very highest level, like chapter headings or major section headings. Then all of the nested headings follow below that.

If possible also do not skip heading levels unnecessarily. One way to see how you’re doing in terms of the organization of your document is to use the outline view, and then you can see whether or not your content is organized the way you want it to be. Heading levels followed by chunks of content that could be paragraphs or lists or tables, whatever that may be. But you can kind of tell if things flow the way you want them to, if the heading structure makes sense, given the kind of content that you’re working with.

Here’s where I would say do not rely on Microsoft’s AI assistance to provide meaningful alternative text. I’m gonna assume, okay, so it hasn’t generated it, let’s see what it gives us.

A person sitting at a desk using a computer. That’s kind of okay as far as it goes.

But you as the author of the document are gonna understand much better what this image might mean in context, and you’ll be able to give it more meaningful alternative text. Again, you could let the AI bot generate a draft of this for you, but do not count on it to be accurate. I have seen way too many, Morgan is here to testify to this.

You can get alt text that is a ‘graph of a graph, of a graph, of a graph, of a graph’. That is real alt text that was really generated by Microsoft Word.

So always double check. Within the document, you can get at the alt text by right clicking on your image, calling up the view alt text, little dialogue. Again, you can let it generate it for you, you can type it yourself.

You can mark it is decorative. So this might be for, I don’t know, little visual elements that don’t bring any meaning to your document. Divider bars, little scrolly things, just stuff that is not particularly meaningful.

Here again, is where this accessibility helper, this is relatively new to me, but it will pop up and it will give you tips on how to fix things again, as you go. So missing alt text for this picture we can add it there or move on, let’s see. Now our little accessibility helper doesn’t find any problems here, and it’s disappeared.

Another component in an accessible document we’re gonna take a quick look at is the hyperlink text. We want to have meaningful, workable, useful, understandable hyperlink text.

The example in this document is a Mailto link. But all of the same rules apply.

Here we have a link we can tell because it’s underlined, and you can recognize it here. I’m gonna take a quick look at the dialogue for that. Whatever text you want to use as hyperlink text.

In the insert tab on the editing ribbon, links, and edit hyperlink. This one has some nice options for us. We can tell it what text we want it to display.

This should be person readable, and it should be clear. Do not use link text like click here or read more. That doesn’t tell anybody enough about where their link is going.

We’ll add the link address. In this case it’s the email address that it’s gonna send to. Add a subject header for that email.

I think that’s a nice clever addition to this. Additionally, one more thing, you want to add a screen tip. This is again kind of like alternative text for your link.

In this case we’re saying contact Landon Hotel HR. This might be read out in the PDF format.

It’s a little bit debatable about whether it’s actually helpful for assistive technology, but in the PDF format, automated checkers are looking for this. So here, link text, human readable, destination for your link, and then the screen tip added here. Next on the list, some tips about fonts and the format and color.

Do not use fancy or elaborate fonts for your main body text. You might use them sparingly for design purposes or emphasis, maybe as a heading or something like that, but do not. It can be fatiguing to try to decode a really elaborate or fancy font. So I would say plain fonts, some of the default system fonts are very nice and readable.

So try to stick with those for your text. Do not use all caps for your body text. Same deal with the fancy fonts, perhaps for emphasis or design purposes, maybe for headings.

But do not present your reader with a block of all caps text. Also, don’t overuse italics. That’s also difficult to read again when there’s too much of it in one place. A block of text in italics is just a little bit tiring to read.

Then finally, in terms of font styling, avoid underlining anything that is not a link. That is such a convention. People expect things that are underlined to be links.

Obviously there are some style guides that require the use of underlines for other purposes. Obey those style guides obviously, but don’t overuse underline. You don’t use underlining for emphasis anymore because people will expect a clickable link.

I’m gonna talk just very briefly about sufficient contrast. You want your text color to have sufficient contrast with the background.

So if it finds any low contrast text, the accessibility checker will present you with some more contrasty options. Let’s create a bad example here. I’m gonna make some pale gray text.

And you can see right away that our accessibility checking friend on the side, bar here has already flagged this as an issue. So when we check it out, it presents me with some more contrasty options to use. If I need color for some reason, I just need it to be sufficiently contrasty with the background.

Microsoft actually recommends the Colour Contrast Analyser. That’s an external tool you can download for Mac or PC to check your color choices. We love it too, and we also have a bunch more CDA-recommended color tools at our website. Again, with the text formatting, if you’re creating a list, make sure to designate it as an actual list.

I’m gonna try to scroll gently to the next list that I know. So here we have a nice unordered list, and we can see in the editing ribbon that it has been created as a bullet list. So, don’t make it look like a list and not have it actually be designated as a list.

One thing to do if you have a long document with a lot of text is to adjust the space between sentences and paragraphs without using additional hard returns, carriage returns. That’s what we called them back in the typewriter days line breaks, I guess. So I don’t know what they call them nowadays.

But the way to know how to give yourself a little bit of space is in the format menu paragraph. There’s a couple of ways to do this.

Spacing. Create a little bit of padding before and or after your paragraphs here. So then there will be a little bit of space between them. People will be able to follow along.

It’s easier on the eye. They can address chunks of content in a simpler way. Then Microsoft actually recommends that if you want to test your content, to try out the Immersive Reader functionality.

So in Word, this is both on Mac and the PC, Immersive Reader is available on the Review tab, or the View tab, I’m sorry. This extracts the text of your document, presents it in a format that might be easier to read and follow, and will also read it aloud for you.

[NARRATOR]
Legal issues and complete any necessary paperwork. Employees are presented with all codes.

[EMILY BAKER]
Some of these characteristics are changeable. You can pick a couple of different voices. You can speed it up and slow it down.

You can adjust the background color. But this will tell you basically if your content is flowing in the order that you want, and if it makes general sense.

It doesn’t read the alt text of images and it will not read charts and graphs for you, but it will present the text. A few tips that Microsoft doesn’t necessarily make perfectly clear is that you should avoid putting important information in the document header or footer because the content in those regions will be artifacted when it’s ported to the PDF format.

That means that it will be visible on the page, but it will not be available or read out by assistive technology. If the information is vital to understanding the document, try to include it one time somewhere in the body on the first page or on the last page. But these items in the footer of the document here are not read by assistive technology and they’re not necessary.

The page number, the screen reader will keep track of the page number on behalf of the reader. So you don’t need to interrupt the flow of the document to present the page number to a reader. So it’s perfectly fine for this information to exist.

Just know that you don’t want anything vital importance in the header or the footer. This also goes for live links. Do not include live links in the document header or footer. This causes a couple of different kinds of headaches in the resulting PDF file.

For one, as I mentioned, it will be artifacted so the link text will not be tagged. Weirdly though, the link object, so the actual hyperlink object will be created and exist but cannot be tagged because of this weird, I don’t know what you’d call it, in-between zone there.

It will be an error, it will be a problem for assistive technology users. Sighted readers who can click on links with a mouse won’t have any problem. But keyboard-only users who tab through your document will not be able to access links in the header or footer, and screen reader users won’t even know that they’re there.

Again, if you must include a link in the header or footer, make it a simple URL and unlink it So you leave the URL there. Then include it once as a live link somewhere else in the body of the document. I mentioned we can use Microsoft’s accessibility checker that is on the review tab check accessibility, and we can follow along with all of these suggestions and fix them as we need.

Our little immediate helper popping up at any time during the document while we’re working on it. Interestingly though, one of the things that’s vital to an accessible PDF that Microsoft does not remind you about is that your PDF ultimately is gonna need some metadata attached to it. What do I even mean by that?

This is going to be document metadata, a title metadata. So not the title style in the content of the document, but rather something that is attached to the document proper.

This is found under the File menu, Properties, on the Summary tab. For accessibility purposes, only the title metadata is required. But you might, if you like, add some other metadata. Some of these, the subject, which is kind of like keywords or tags here, might assist with searching for it later.

If you’re using the University’s Microsoft Word and you’re logged in as you, then you’re gonna show up as the author of this document. That might or might not be appropriate for every use case. So I recommend checking this and making sure that maybe it’s a role-based author information as you like here, but this information is vital to the resulting PDF file.

[PAT KOGOS]
Emily, we have a question in the chat. Do footnotes get read by screen readers?

I guess a two-part question in Word and also in the PDF.

[EMILY BAKER]
Yes, in references to the footnotes, are a valid content type in both Word and the PDF. It’s more complex a little bit because you have link references and stuff that go back and forth. I’m not addressing them in this particular session. We don’t have time, but yes, footnotes can be made accessible in both file formats.

[PAT KOGOS]
Great, thank you.

[EMILY BAKER]
Then another quick one, it needs to be designated your language. The language of your file needs to be designated. Now, if you are writing your document in the same language as your main system language is configured, so I work in English, so my operating system is set to English, so therefore my Word document is set to English.

But maybe, maybe, maybe you’re writing a document in another language, maybe you’re teaching a French class, or maybe you have to sprinkle your document with a few words in another language. This is my default. In English, as I said, it’s gonna be set perfectly for most regular everyday documents. But if for example, I’ll pretend this is gonna be French, Tools, Language, Select your language.

What this will do, now it already knows that this is not correct French. What this is going to do though, is it is going to tell Screen Reader Technology that the language of this little part of the document is French and it will allow the voice to change to a French voice and to pronounce the words correctly in French.

If you don’t do that, then your plain language screen reader will mangle whatever second language is in here. So if you have words or paragraphs or pages in another language, make sure to use the language tool to mark them up properly.

I’ll just switch this back to English so I don’t get horrible failures in the future. Those are the main little metadata things that the Word accessibility checker isn’t going to tell you explicitly to do, but it is necessary to do it. We’re gonna pretend that we actually fixed absolutely everything in this document.

I know that I didn’t. I’m gonna show you very quickly a couple of different ways to create a PDF.

So, the wrong way, do not do this. This is a do not. Do not print to PDF.

Don’t do it. This will create a PDF file that is not accessible at all. It won’t quite be image-based. I think it kind of used to be, it used to end up as a totally image-based PDF, but it does not carry over any of the accessibility features that you built in to your document.

Instead, in the File menu, Save As. And then on the File Format drop-down, select PDF for our purposes, Electronic Distribution and Accessibility, and then Export Your File.

If you do have Acrobat Pro installed on your computer, it will have put another tab on the ribbon, your editing ribbon, you can use this also to create a PDF export. Those two forms of export are not necessarily identical. So let’s say you create a document and you use the Save As, and then you think, ooh, this isn’t quite as accessible as I want it to be when you check it later. You can try the Acrobat export and see if that does a better job.

It might vary depending on the type of content. I can’t explain why, but it’s just the way it is.

I guess we should pause. I think we have three minutes.

I can take another couple of questions and maybe what we’ll do is come up with a new session exclusively about the little things that you have to do in the PDF format after the fact. I’ll stop sharing and come back to life.

So, in the chat for any questions or please feel free to unmute and just ask.

[PAT KOGOS]
Emily, did you want to just give a quick shout out to the PAC Checker then I’ll post that link.

[EMILY BAKER]
Oh absolutely. So, as I mentioned in my little disclaimer, we are aiming for a largely usable PDF with no major barriers. The Acrobat Checker, the Acrobat Pro will check your PDF for those characteristics that it was looking for. Siteimprove will look for some certain things but if you really want a rigorous check of the PDF/UA specification, there’s something called the PAC Checker, PDF Accessibility Checker, it’s available for download for Windows.

I thought they had mounted an online checker, supposedly a Mac version is in the works but that’s been the case for a really long time. So if you are looking for a much more rigorous check of more checkpoints and including lots of other PDF/UA specs, that is a really great tool to use. These basics might not get you all the way there, but that check will give you hints about what to go back and fix if you need a more stringent standard. Well, thank you all for coming today, and we’ll see you next time.