Creating Screen Reader accessible PDFs from Word docs in Switch

wilsonj · Post by **wilsonj** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 3:27 pm

Does anyone have any success stories creating screen reader accessible PDFs from Word docs?

It's a new topic for us, and I've tried a number of different Word to PDF applications without success - although I'm not certain there isn't some configuration setting I'm missing.

We're using Word 2010 in conjunction with Switch 10 and Callas PDF Toolbox 5 for our standard Word to PDF conversions, but the PDFs produced via this method don't contain the tags required for accessibility. I've reviewed the documentation and have not been able to find any references to the screen reader output.

I've also tried using Acrobat itself (within Switch) and Tracker software's PDF X-Change to no avail. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

dkelly · Post by **dkelly** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 3:31 pm

Are you able to control the creation of the original Word document's structure? For example, insuring that columns are created using Column tool instead of tabs and images have AltText?

wilsonj · Post by **wilsonj** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 3:41 pm

I'm afraid we don't have any control over the construction of the Word documents, but creating a PDF manually does result in it being screen reader accessible.

dkelly · Post by **dkelly** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 5:57 pm

How does the manual process of creating accessible PDF differ from your attempts to create an automated workflow?

wilsonj · Post by **wilsonj** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 9:51 pm

When I convert a Word doc to PDF manually (on the server where Switch resides), I'm using Word 2010's 'Save as...' function with the 'Standard' settings.

I'm thinking this may be where the problem lies - PowerSwitch 10 doesn't support Word 2010, so I'll install Switch 11 on our test machine and see if we can't get the output we're looking for using the Word configurator instead of PDF Toolbox.

dkelly · Post by **dkelly** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 10:58 pm

callas pdftoolbox uses OpenOffice or libreOffice which doesn't have very good support for accessible PDF. Here's an open bug report asking for that capability - https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39667