Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone

Creating Accessible PDF Documents

You can satisfy the requirement for accessible documents—up to a point, at least—by using Acrobat 5 together with Microsoft Word 2000 to create “tagged PDF” files, which retain information about content, structure (chapters, sections, headings, tables, and so on), layout, and the order in which elements should be read aloud. (As explained in Chapters 7 and 9 and elsewhere, reading order is not always self-evident—for example, when text flows around an image, a text box, or a table.)

Installing Acrobat 5 adds a new Acrobat menu to Microsoft Office applications, including Word (Figure 12-1).

Figure 12-1. The Acrobat menu added to Microsoft Word 2000. Used with permission.

The Convert to Adobe PDF feature is ...