vmstill.blogg.se - Accessibility in word 2013 pdf

#ACCESSIBILITY IN WORD 2013 PDF PDF#

#ACCESSIBILITY IN WORD 2013 PDF PDF#

In figure 2, below the same PDF document has been opened in Microsoft Word. Figure 1 – a PDF in Adobe Acrobat – it appears to have poor accessibility.

Note there is no bookmark panel available on the left hand side because Adobe Reader has been unable to identify structural headings. Figure 1 shows a sample of the PDF in Adobe reader. To my amazement a PDF with no bookmark navigation in Adobe reader and poor reflow (all the spaces between the words disappeared) turned out to be considerably more accessible when opened in Microsoft Word. Somebody asked if there were any accessibility benefits of opening a PDF document in Microsoft Word. Detailed guidance is available from Adobe’s Best Practice Guide but for casual users the UK Government’s advice on creating accessible PDFs from Word documents is a readable starting point. Make sure you are aware of good practice in making accessible PDFs. How can you make a poor PDF better? Option 1 – for authors the inbuilt text-to-speech is clunky and unreliable.mathematical notation and formulae exist only as pictures so cannot be used with screenreaders or other assistive technologies.when text is reflowed the spaces between the words disappear making the text impossible to read effectively.the bookmark panel doesn’t pick up the heading structures in the text.

text has been copy protected so it is impossible to use with many assistive technologies that rely on clipboard access.

text is grouped with images so reflow doesn’t work.

text is laid over images make it hard to read.

It cannot be used for text to speech or screen readers.

the PDF has no text on it at all, only a picture of text.

However, a poorly accessible PDF document is much more common due to their current abundance in the ebook publishing supply line.

read out loud using the inbuilt text to speech tool.Īs Ted Page points out, problems with PDFs are problems with the accessibility awareness of the creator rather than the format itself.

allow navigation via the bookmark panel (similar to Word’s Navigation pane/Document map view) and.

get the text to automatically scroll up the page at a speed determined by the reader using the up and down arrow keys (Word can’t do this).

reflow text so you do not need to scroll left and right as the text magnifies.

magnify many times more than a Word document can.

change the background colours (and, sometimes, the text colour).

If a PDF document has been created to basic accessibility standards it has the following benefits: you can. In the process he discovered some weird and wonderful things about redeeming inaccessible PDFs… How are PDFs good for accessibility? Alistair McNaught thought the debate was worthwhile enough to summarise as a blog post. A recent question on the Assistive-technology Jisc mail list ( ) sparked some interesting debate.