WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessible "save as pdf" plug ins for Word on OSX

for

From: John E Brandt
Date: Jan 7, 2011 10:27AM

It has been a while since I did the background research on MS Office 2008
for Mac and accessibility, but as I recall, there were some major
shortcomings of that product in terms of making accessible documents. The
biggest and most obvious one was that there was no way to add an Alternative
Description to an image in Word 2008 for Mac like you can in the MS-Office
for Windows OS. This would mean that any conversion from the .doc or .docx
to .pdf would result in a flawed document in terms of accessibility.

I've scouted though some of my notes and articles about this, but can't put
my finger on my notes regarding this. But as I recall (and it has been a
couple of years since I did this work), the only solution I found at the
time was to use Adobe Acrobat Professional to check and edit the PDF and
make it accessible. But note that the original Word document will remain
inaccessible.

I have not had the opportunity to upgrade my Mac to MS Office 2011 for Mac,
so I don't know if this editing function was built into the new version. I
do not use the Mac to produce content that will be shared with others for
this reason.

BTW, Pages in Apple iWork '09 also does not have the ability to add
Alternative Descriptions to images. The same is true of all of the
applications in the iWork suite, none appear to allow you to add Alternative
Descriptions to images.

I think I used recommend to Mac users to use OpenOffice, but at the very
least they needed to use Adobe Acrobat Pro if they were going to create PDFs
from word processor documents made on a Mac.

If there is anyone on the list who is using MS Office on Mac 2011, perhaps
they could check this out for us.

~j

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA