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Re: Office 365 for authoring accessible documents

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Nov 4, 2015 10:32AM

> You really need a more robust tool than MS office to create accessible PDFs reliably.

Today - yes. But tomorrow is up to you.

Microsoft can decide, at any time, to resolve each of these issues in Word, and provide software that makes fully accessible PDF documents and deserves a PDF/UA conformance claim (and WCAG 2.0 conformance claim, for that matter) without *any* additional tweaking.

> Tables will only have column headers, the tag order may be incorrect if either the images are floated or if the file is docx file type. MS office does not have a tool that you can use to inspect and repair the PDF document as needed.

Today - yes. But these things shouldn't have to be fixed in the PDF at all. The DOCX format, so far as I am aware, allows for table row-headers, and to fix the logical ordering of floating objects, etc. Microsoft just hasn't gotten around to supporting these features yet.

It's just software; it can be improved.

> If you cannot afford a robust PDF tool, I recommend publishing the content as HTML. There are a large number of free text and html editors available. You can publish the PDF content along-side of the HTML content.

If HTML is appropriate, use HTML. If PDF (a fixed rendering) is appropriate, then you can solve your problem (over time) by asking Microsoft to improve their product in specific ways to address your needs.

Duff.