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Re: Accessible Word Docs - Need Help

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From: Jon Metz
Date: Jun 14, 2016 8:53AM


Completely shameless plug here, but I made a series of videos to take a Word document and turn it into a PDF/UA compliant PDF (https://youtu.be/BeFt-Qa3mjM?list=PLmfVOnJxeSEXsEKv2i20nYMHYuFEcl4fO). However, you could ignore the last video unless there's a requirement to do that, or you need a way to validate that it works as an accessible PDF. Up to the 3rd video explains how to make a tagged document and make it as accessible as possible before going all out compliant.

The first video goes through what's necessary to make the Word file as accessible as possible. I'd avoid adding forms in Word first before moving to PDF, because more headaches happen in the translation to PDF.

I'm still getting around to editing the last video which goes over testing, but I did a short session on it for ID24 you can check out here: https://youtu.be/1CCQ5TGlM0I?list=PL95LOQw9SLWxmcZtzBiFuT9HAJKFJnl2n. Just know that in order to validate accessibility, you would have needed to suffer through all 4 of those videos.

Once you're in the 3rd video, simply refer to Adobe's guidance on creating an accessible form in Acrobat (http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/creating-accessible-forms.html) or Joseph's tutorial (which I haven't looked at yet). Hope this helps you.

Cheers,
Jon Metz



On 6/10/16, 2:18 PM, "WebAIM-Forum on behalf of Morin, Gary (NIH/OD) [E]" < <EMAIL REMOVED> on behalf of <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>Carolyn,
>
>The changes you make will also make it possible for those who are sighted and/but are using speech recognition software. My sense or experience is that online forms are the easiest to fill-in but probably much more involved on the backend, involving developers or database management, than just issuing Word or PDF-based forms.
>
>Gary
>
>