Word and PDF "Best Practices" for Content Creation

Ken Petri

Director, OSU Web Accessibility Center (WAC)

When to Use PDF

Very long, complexly footnoted documents
To preserve visual layout (multiple columns, etc.)
Documents designed for print
Complex math (because MathML is limited)
If legally restricted (example, tax forms)

When to Use PDF (continued)

In most other cases use HTML in preference to PDF

Accessibility of PDF

Platforms Supporting PDF
- Windows via Acrobat/Acrobat Reader, GSView (others?)
- Mac OS X natively via Preview
- Linux/Unix via Acrobat Reader, Ghostview, OpenOffice, KPDF
- Both Pocket PC and Palm devices via various readers
Screen Reader Access
- JAWS, Window-Eyes, and IBM Home Page Reader on Windows
- VoiceOver and Preview on Mac OS X Tiger
- Linux: KTTS? Gnopernicus? Orca?

PDF is very widely supported. Virtually all platforms have a readily available reader. The status of screen reader support is not as clear. The major screen reading programs on Windows and VoiceOver on Mac do a good job reading PDF. On Linux, there are a number of screen reader projects. We have not tested them yet. We have seen mention online of Gnopernicus working well with PDF. KTTS is the text-to-speech system for the KDE desktop. It is designed to work with KDE desktop applications; however, the developer roadmap shows that KPDF is currently not working with KTTS. One of the most promissing Linux accessibility projects is Orca. It is aimed at the GNOME desktop and is currently being developed by Sun Microsystems. For more on Linux and assistive technologies, check out Sun Accessibility Architect Peter Korn's Blog.

Accessibility of PDF (continued)

Screen Reader Access within Web Pages
- In IE only and then with marginal success
- Best to open "externally" in Acrobat Reader (more on this at end of presentation)

Checking PDF for Accessibility

Get Document Properties
- File → Document Properties, check if Tagged PDF
Try selecting some text
- Can it be selected?
Try enlarging the text
- Does it scale without distorting too much?
Try linearizing the document
- View → Reflow
- Is the reading order acceptable?
Let Acrobat read it for you
- View → Read Out Loud

Checking PDF for Accessibility (continued)

Best Solution: "View" the PDF with a screen reader
- See WAC overview of Screen Readers for download and other information (http://wac.osu.edu/resources/at.html#screen-readers)

"Types" of PDF

Images of text: inaccessible and unindexable
Untagged PDF
- Screen reader with "auto-tag"
- Auto-tagging results are often poor
- Auto-tagged documents almost always require manual touch-up (painful!)
Tagged and well-structured PDF is the goal

Depending on its settings, Acrobat Professional will attempt to run optical character recognition on PDFs that have been originally created by scanning an image of text. We have seen very good results from this process. In terms of accessibility, however, this cannot be counted on. First, Acrobat Reader, the web browser plugin and stand-alone program most users will have on their systems, does not have the OCR functionality. Second, this post-processing does not created tagged PDF.

In many configurations, viewing a PDF while a screen reading program is running will launch the auto-tagging feature within Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. Tagging is the process of marking up the text within a PDF document and applying to it a structure that a screen reading program can understand. This tagging should be done when the PDF is created (more on this later). If it is not done when the PDF is created, Acrobat and Acrobat Reader will try to automatically generate a tag structure for the PDF. Auto-tagging often results in poorly marked up PDF that is non-optimal for screen readers.

The best strategy for accessible PDF is to use PDF Maker to generate a solid tag structure from inside a well-laid out Microsoft Word document. We cover this below.

Retrofitting Bad PDF

Were PDFs authored before Acrobat version 5.0 (2001)? If so, they are untagged, at best
Strategies for retrofitting
- Find the original text/Word document and re-PDF
- OCR, dictate, or retype, if original is an image
- Manually tag (ouch! ultra-painful!)

Creating Accessible PDF from Word

Don't
- Don't print to "Adoble PDF"
- Don't use tabs or spaces for alignment or formatting
- Don't style text divisions by changing font size and weight
Do
- Do use PDFMaker to export to PDF
- Do use styles
- Do create headings
- Do caption and make alternative text for images
- Do create real lists
- Do consider TOC and TOF

Steps for PDF from Word

Check if PDF Maker Plugin is active
- Help → About: Disabled Items

Making Good Use of Word

Use built in or custom styles for all basic formatting. No tabbing or font-size adjustments to make "headings", returns to make line breaks between paragraphs, etc.

You can open MS Word's style menu in a pane in the right-hand side of the Word window. Either click on the icon depicting two "A"s to the left of the styles pull down menu or, from the main menu, Format → Styles and Formatting....

Use the Styles and Formatting menu for all text formatting. Doing so will not only save you time and make the appearance of Word documents more consistent, it will also go a long way toward helping create well-structured and accessible PDFs.

One immediately visible benefit comes from using headings in the Styles and Formatting menu. Headings inserted or formatted from that menu become structure when you create a Table of Contents within Word and become bookmarks in the bookmark panel when you output PDF using PDF Maker.

Add Text Alternatives

For inserted images or figures, create well thought out text alternatives
- Right-click, Format picture, enter text on Web tab

Text alternatives are read by screen reading programs and provide essential information for blind and low-vision users. You can think of text alternatives for images as the equivalent of "ALT" text for images in web pages.

Captioning and Tables of Contents

Captioning of figures and tables
- Select object, Insert → Reference → Caption
Creating tables of contents or tables of figures
- Insert page break at start of document (good time to create a title page, as well)
- Tables of contents are generated from headings, figures from captions
- Insert → Reference → Indexes and Tables → use either Table of Contents or Table of Figures tab

Created this way in MS Word, when exported via PDF Maker, the table of contents in the PDF is hyperlinked, so that clicking any entry in it will take you to that section in the PDF. This and the bookmarks pane help greatly with navigation for screen reader users and persons with mobility impairments.

Captioning (continued)

Note that the caption must be implemented as a "frame" rather than a text box
- To convert, Format → Text Box, "Text Box" tab, "Convert to Frame" button

The caption on a table or graphic can appear either above, below, or to the side of the image. It won't appear in the table of figures, however, until you convert the caption text box to a frame, as illustrated above.

Converting from Word to PDF

Click the "Convert to Adobe PDF" button

Troubleshooting PDF

Basic check for tagged PDF
- File → Document Properties, Tagged: Yes
Check read order for multi-column documents
- View → Reflow
Set a tab order
- Pages tab, select a page, Page Properties, Tab Order tab, select Use Document Structure
Bookmarks can be manually created from the Bookmarks tab. To make sure it shows by default, choose File → Document Properties → Initial View → Show → Bookmarks Panel and Page

Accessibility Menu in Acrobat

Advanced → Accessibility allows
- Touchup Reading Order to guarantee read order
- And can run accessibility checks, Full Check being the most useful

Fine Tuning PDF

To set properties for any tagged element (figure, bit of text), open the Tags pane (View → Tags) select the element, right-click, Properties
Once common example would be setting the language for text

HTML Alternatives to PDF

Text documents and presentations are generally more accessible as well-structured HTML
- Convert PowerPoint and Word to HTML with the Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard
- For those with knowledge of HTML, Eric Meyer's s5 is a presentation alternative

As mentioned earlier in this presentation, there are specific use cases for PDF. If your document is going to be on the web and does not fall into one of those use cases, well structured HTML is generally a more accessible format than PDF.

For a definitive overview of when to use PDF and discussion of its relative accessibility, see Joe Clark's Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility. WebAIM also has an excellent discussion and tutorial on PDF Accessibilty.

Linking Strategies Within Carmen

Since you can't tell Carmen to force a document to open in an external program, you must announce the type of the document in the link text. Use a parenthetical descriptor:
- my hyperlink to document (MS Word) or
  my hyperlink to document (PDF)
IE will try to open Word and PDF within the browser window. Other browsers on Windows will open Word in its native application. PDF will load into the browser window.
We have had extremely poor results with screen readers reading PDF inside browsers other than IE. And even in Internet Explorer results are mixed.

OSU Web Accessibility Center, August 2006