This tutorial teaches you how to convert a Microsoft Word document to an accessible PDF. In this tutorial, we assume you’ve already created an accessible Word document. If you haven’t, start there.
Before you convert to a PDF, add a document title to your Word document. This helps you avoid the “Missing Document Title” error in Adobe Acrobat and Canvas.
Converting from a Word Document to a PDF
- Go to File > Save As (or File > Save a Copy) and choose where to save your PDF.
- In the Save As window, change the Save as type to PDF (*.pdf).
- If you haven’t already, set an easy-to-read Title for your document. Adobe Acrobat displays this title rather than the filename and screen readers read it aloud to identify the PDF.
- Check the “Open file after publishing” checkbox to evaluate the resulting PDF.
- Select the Options button and review the Include non-printing information section. Check every checkbox in that section:
- Create bookmarks using: Headings. While bookmarks are mostly helpful for longer documents, they ensure everyone can easily scan your PDF.
- Document properties. This carries over the properties set in your Word document, such as the Document Title and document author.
- Document structure tags for accessibility. This ensures the resulting PDF includes tags, making the PDF readable by screen readers.
- Click OK to save the options.
- Click Save to convert your Word document to an accessible PDF.
Because you checked the “Open file after publishing” checkbox, the resulting PDF will appear after some processing time.
Please note: Neither the Save as Adobe PDF nor the Print to PDF features in Microsoft Word will create an accessible PDF! These features should be avoided.
This tutorial is part of the Accessibility Series. More tips on how to get and keep your documents and web pages accessible to come!
Under “Document Properties the phrase “This saves over the properties” is an unfortunate choice of words that may be confusing and suggest something is being lost (erased by having something else saved over it.) Please consider “This brings over the properties” or simply “This saves the properties” instead.
p.s. excellent series.
That is an excellent point! I’ve updated the wording to use your suggested “brings over” phrasing instead.
Thank you so much for the suggestion, and I’m excited to hear that you appreciate my accessibility series tutorials. 🙂
thank you so much for these tutorials! I have a question, when I create my Microsoft Word 365, I use the bulleted list or numbering to create my list. However, when i convert to pdf some of my tags for labels will be correct e.g., (L), , , . and others that were created the same way will not have the tag. Is this common or am I doing something wrong?
Karen,
You’re very welcome! I apologize for my delay in responding! Do you still have issues getting your lists to convert correctly from Microsoft Word 365 to PDF?
You may know this already, but your structure should come out something like this:
L
LI
Lbl
LBody
LI
LI
Lbl
LBody
LI
L
…where the LIs repeat for every list item. Unordered and ordered list structures should have an identical structure but show the bullet or the item number/letter in the Lbl tag.
Are there instances when your list converts to something other than an L tag in the PDF (like a P tag)? I’m trying to understand what happened with your PDF conversion.
Oops, I tried to create a tree structure with spaces, but I guess WordPress truncates each line. Sorry about that; I hope my point comes through there!
Sandra