Making PDFs Accessible: Authoring in Microsoft Word

Transcript

I’m going to switch over now to a Word document. If we look at this document, we’re going to see… at the very top we have a heading If I select that heading and go into Styles in the ribbon on the Home tab open that, you’ll notice that heading one has a gray box around it. I selected that style for that heading. If I go down to the next heading in the document and open the styles again, you’ll see that that is a Heading 2. This allows the screen reader user to, in effect, create that outline to be able to quickly parse the document and understand what’s in it. If I scroll down the document and go to lists, we’ll notice a bulleted list. When I select, notice it up here in the ribbon. It changed. It’s shaded. We used that style. If I go to the numbered list it moves over to the numbered list style. This allows the screen reader to understand that it’s in a list and it is a unique set of information. If we scroll down to the table, and select it … at the very top of the ribbon we get two new tabs: the Design and Layout tabs. I select that Design tab. I want to draw your attention to over here on the left where we have the header row and the first column checkboxes. This allows you to indicate that the first row are column headers and the first column are row headers. Again, making it easier for a screen reader to expose that information to an assistive technology. Now if we go back up to the ribbon, but we head towards the right. We’re going to see a tab that says Acrobat. This is the plug-in you get automatically when you have Acrobat Pro DC and Microsoft Office on the same machine. If we select that tab, you will see the Acrobat ribbon come up what we’re interested in here is over in the left. You can leave all the settings at the default. If we click on Create PDF. We’ll get a dialog to save it, and then a progress indicator showing that is it is converting it to a PDF. When it’s done, it will automatically open it in Acrobat Pro DC for us. -