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Converting Accessible Word to PDF: Tips for automating the process?

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From: Lanini,Marlena
Date: Jul 9, 2012 9:26AM

Hi! I'm new to creating accessible documents and have been following tutorials from this website and others. But I'm still having trouble creating accessible PDFs from a Word document. I was hoping someone could give me some pointers.
I need to create several documents to load onto our website and post them in both Word and PDF file formats.
Software I'm using: Word 2010, Adobe Acrobat X
In Word, I'm using styles for headings, adding alt text for images, descriptions for hypertext, etc. When I run the accessibility checker in Word, it says "no accessibility issues found".
To create a PDF from the Word document, I've been using the "Create a PDF" Add-In. When I view the tags, they appear to have been created correctly. But I'm having the following problems:

* Tab Order: Any page with a hypertext link comes up with the error from the accessibility checker "Tab Order may be inconsistent with the structure order ". Is there a way to get it to automatically use the source document structure for tab order? Otherwise I have to fix every page in the PDF containing a link in Adobe after the conversion, which can be time consuming.

* Reading Order: the reading order is messed up. It labels all the text and headings in the correct order, but then labels all the figures last on each page regardless of where the image appears on the page. I have figured out how to manually fix the reading order in Adobe, but it's time consuming for the number of documents I have. I'm wondering if there is a way during the conversion process to get the reading order to match the visual display of the Word document automatically?

* Reflow: In the Adobe conversion process, I've checked the box "enable accessibility and reflow with tagged Adobe PDF" in preferences. But in Adobe when I select Reflow and then zoom in, it doesn't actually reflow. Did I miss a step?
Thanks,
Marlena