Make accessible PDFs from MS Word

PDFs are generally created from source documents; often that is an MS Word document – which has to be made accessible before being exported (or in the Mac version, saved) as a PDF.

In this short article I outline the steps you need to take to ensure your PDFs are accessible after you have gone through the conversion process. The information in this article assumes that you have already read my article on how to create an accessible Word Document (outlined in my ‘Creating Accessible Word Documents’ guide).

A summary: how to create an accessible Word document

In summary to make your Word document accessible you must:

• Use styles to add semantic structure, i.e.