Saving accessible PDFs from Microsoft Word

- [Instructor] Probably the first thing you should know when saving an accessible PDF file from Word is how to do it. There are a couple of options that work and I'd like to show you what they are here. Now the first thing I want you to know, and if you take anything away from this video, it is that you cannot create an accessible PDF file by choosing file print. I'm just going to demonstrate it to illustrate why. And so if I go to the file menu and I choose print, if you have Adobe Acrobat installed, you'll notice that one of the printers that is always available to me is Adobe PDF. And so if I choose that as my printer and I click the print button, it is going to process my file. But when it does, it's going to run it through what's called the print stream. And the print stream does not provide any accessibility components whatsoever. And when I use this method, it's going to open it up. And you can see, here's the PDF that it created. It's called 0401 print. But if I open up my tags pane, this is that kiss of death I was talking about. You have zero tags using that method. So the moral of the story is don't use that method to create an accessible PDF file, it's no good. So back to Word. What I'm going to do is you have two methods that you can use to create an accessible PDF file and those two methods, one is the Microsoft method, the other is the Adobe method. So the Microsoft method can be achieved by going to the file menu and choosing save as. And in the save as dropdown menu, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click the browse button to tell it where to put my file. And in the save as type dropdown, I'm going to choose PDF. Now I'm going to call this one 0401MS for Microsoft. But then what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the options button. In here, there's a lot of really good information but the key elements here is the checkbox that says document structure tags for accessibility. You also want to include the document properties. That way if you give your document a title, that will get passed on to the PDF. And then I can also tell it to create bookmarks based on my headings in my document. And so when I click okay and I hit the save button, it's going to create a PDF for me. This is the one that I created using the Microsoft technique. And if I open up my tags pane, you're going to see that automatically I am getting tag structure in my document. This is a big deal because this is exactly what we're looking for. We're looking to leverage the source file to generate the tags for me. So that was the Microsoft method. Now I'm going to go back to Word and I'm going to show you the Acrobat method. Now you're only going to have this option if you have Adobe Acrobat Professional installed on your machine. During installation, Adobe installs a component into the office applications called the PDF Maker and you'll know you have it because if you look up here at the top of your ribbon, you're going to see a tab called Acrobat. And if you click on that tab, you're going to see a whole bunch of options in here related to the PDF format. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the preferences button. And inside of here, similar to the Microsoft method, the key element here is this checkbox right here, enable accessibility and reflow with tagged Adobe PDF. Now this little checkbox that says enable advanced tagging alludes to the fact that it somehow makes your tagging better. It doesn't. So I encourage you to leave it unchecked. I've found it to overcomplicate the tag structure so I always leave that unchecked but I would enable ad links, enable create bookmarks. And when you do that, you can come up here to the bookmarks tab and tell it what you want bookmarks created from. And by default, it's going to create bookmarks based on Word headings. You can also choose convert Word styles to bookmarks. All of your styles are listed in here so you can choose whichever one you want. But I'm going to leave mine set to convert Word headings to bookmarks, click okay. And then I'll click the create PDF button and it needs to save my file. So I'm going to go ahead and say yes and then I'll call this 0401 Adobe. And when I save this one, again, you can see the PDF maker pop up. And similar to what we saw using the Microsoft method, if I come over here, this is my Adobe version, and if I open up the tags pane, you're going to see very similar situation. I will tell you, you will see differences between the Microsoft method and the Adobe method. Although they're generally very similar, you will see variances in the tag structure. You might have noticed the Microsoft version, these tags were called something else. Now they're called art. Both will create a tagged PDF and they both work very well. So regardless of the method you choose, just make sure you use one of the methods that will yield a proper accessible PDF file in your documents.