MS Word Accessibility Best Practices

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Overview

This document assumes that the end goal is to create an ADA-compliant PDF using Microsoft Word as the editor of the “native file”.

Always keep in mind Adobe’s advice:

Whenever possible, accessibility should be incorporated directly into the document using the application that created it. When accessibility is incorporated directly into the source document, less repair work will be required in Adobe Acrobat. This is very important when the PDF must be regenerated based on changes in the source file. If changes are only made in the PDF and not in the source file, accessibility work will need to be done each time the document is updated.

MS Word 2013’s Accessibility Checker

File > Info > Inspect Document > Check Accessibility

The Accessibility Checker panel should be displayed to the right of the document. Most of the issues listed below will show up in the Inspection Results if they are found in the document.

Troubleshooting

Error displayed when running the Accessibility Checker on a document in an incompatible format.

This is a feature that is only available in MS Word 2013. Documents have to be saved in the most current format (.docx) also.

Documents must be converted to a compatible format with File > Info > Compatibility Mode > Convert. A prompt may be displayed warning that minor layout changes may ensue. Click OK to continue.

Finally, save the upgraded version of the file (a .docx extension should automatically be appended to the new version of the document) File > Save

Table of contents

TK documentation of how tables of contents should be constructed in Word to generate the appropriate structure in PDFs.

  • All items should be linked to the appropriate location in the document.
  • All items should ultimately be broken out into TOC_Title, TOC_Leader, and TOC_Page.

Page headers and footers

To edit the page headers or footers, double click on the header or footer area on a page.

Editing the header or footer is necessary in order to edit any images or objects within the header or footer that are throwing accessibility errors.

E.g. if right clicking an image at the top of a page does not result in a context menu including the Format Picture option, it may mean that the image is in the page header. First edit the header, then right click the image to access its Format Picture contextual menu.

Headings

  • Assign heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc) to headings (and not a variation on the Normal paragraph style with bold text, for example). This will add the appropriate heading tags in the PDF document.
  • Be careful to nest headings correctly, e.g. “Heading 2” follows “Heading 1”, “Heading 3” follows “Heading 2”, etc.

Tables

  • All tables need headers.
    • In the sample documents the cells that should be header cells are not marked as such, they are marked as ordinary table cells.
    • Select the table > select cells from the row(s) that contain the headers
    • (Table Tools) > Layout > Repeat Header Rows
  • Tables with inconsistent cell counts.
    • All rows in a given table should have the same number of cells. If for some reason one row has fewer cells, at least some of those cells should be assigned a "colspan" that indicates that the cell spans multiple columns in other rows.
    • This looks like it's an issue with the Export to PDF function within Word not generating a table that accurately reflects the table as it is set up in Word.
    • For an example, 13b-8630 AP_and_college_admissions_for CB Research Note_2013REVKB_EJS.doc, page 31.
    • There are cells in the left column that span multiple rows. There are also cells in the first row that span multiple columns.
    • If the table is selected in Word and View Gridlines is checked, the grid in Word accurately takes all this into account.
    • However, after exporting the document as a PDF, extra cells are added, and there are some gaps where cells are missing.
    • It looks like this will need to be cleaned up in Acrobat using the Touch-Up Reading Order function.

Images

All images must have alternate text. Right click on an image > Format Picture > Layout & Properties tab > Alt Text > Description

Artifacts

MS Word has no support for marking images as artifacts. Entering a space character in the Alt Text Description field will NOT prevent "Missing Alt Text" errors in the Accessibility Checker. Entering a dash character will prevent these accessibility errors.

CommonLook Office provides support for artifacts.

Objects Not Inline warnings

All images should be inline and not floating. The placement of floating images within the flow of a document cannot be determined by screen readers.

To fix, left click the image > click Layout Options > In Line With Text. Note that this will usually shift the position of the image around a should be done by a layout operator and not necessarily by a compliance operator.

Charts

Any chart is really just one object for the purposes of compliance. (Unlike tables, for example, which are objects containing rows, which are each objects that in turn contains cells, which again are more objects which then fork into two flavors: header and data.)

Compliance for charts is simply a matter of providing alternate text. A complicated chart may require equally wordy alternate text, which may be a chore on the content side, but once the content is finalized, assigning the text to the chart is always just a matter of dropping that content in -- whatever it might be -- as the alternate text.

To enter alternate text for a chart:

Right click on the chart > Format Chart Area > Chart Options > Alternate Text tab

Alternate text for an image:

Select the figure > right click > Format Picture > Alt Text tab > enter the Alternative Text content

All graphics and text within the chart should be consolidated into one object for the purposes of assigning alternate text.

  • TK specific examples within Word.
  • TK Take into account imported graphics and other ways of creating a chart or chart-like object that don’t employ Word's built-in chart objects.

Avoid empty paragraph tags and blank characters

  • It’s common for the PDF document to contain empty Paragraph tags.
  • This isn't strictly an issue for compliance, but it does make it more difficult to access the document for compliance because it's necessary to sift through all of the empty tags to find the tags that actually contain content.

This is a result of hitting the Enter key to create space between paragraphs.

  • A cleaner approach would be select a paragraph and edit its layout properties and give it the necessary extra margin above or below to create the gap between it and adjacent content. This will result in only a single Paragraph tag being exported.

Repeated Blank Characters warning

This is caused by two or more adjacent space characters.

Solution: remove the space characters and use tabs instead for positioning. Note that removing the space characters will shift the layout of the document and should be applied by a layout operator and not a compliance operator.

Comments and Annotations

Avoid exporting comments.

File > Export > Create PDF/XPS Document > Options > Publish What: Document (and not “Document showing markup”

Properties that cannot be exported

While the meta title of the document can be set in Word (File > Info > Properties > Show Document Panel > Title), it doesn't get set as the title for accessibility purposes in the PDF. This must be done in Acrobat.

  • Open the PDF in Acrobat
  • Tools panel > Action Wizard > Make Accessible
  • Either run the whole script, or just click on Add Document Description.
  • The title text will be in the text box, simply confirm to set it as the title for accessibility.

External resources

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