Overview

This lesson provides information on using word processing software such as Microsoft Word to create or update a PDF. It tends to be much easier to improve accessibility within Microsoft Word and create an accessible PDF from that source document.

Core Concepts

Creating a PDF and the Importance of Source Documents

Most people do not create PDFs in Adobe. Instead, most folks create documents in Word and save their document as a PDF to restrict editing. It is strongly recommended to begin creating an accessible PDF in a word processing program like Microsoft Word. When you use headings, the text formatting tool, and alt text in Word, it will carry over to your PDF. We also strongly encourage you to keep all source documents as it is incredibly easier to modify and improve a source document than it is to remediate a PDF file. You can use the lessons provided in this course to double check your document and make sure the tags and read order are as anticipated.

That said, there are some benefits to PDFs. For one, if a document does contain text boxes and, for some reason you are unable to remove them, Acrobat does allow you to control where in the read order that content will fall. This can help ensure the content is not overlooked/skipped over as it may be in Word. (But, again, it's better to remove the textbox and just have a fully accessible document that doesn't require you to use two separate programs to repair it.)

No Source Document? No Problem!

If you find yourself in a position where you're missing the source document, don't worry. You can still avoid needing to remediate the document in Acrobat. When viewing the document in Acrobat, select Export PDF from the Tools list. Export the PDF to a Word document and make your changes in Word (this does work on scanned PDFs, but be aware that poor quality scans often contain spelling and punctuation errors).

Additional Resources

How to Convert a PDF File to WordLinks to an external site. - Instructions from Adobe Acrobat.