Office 2007 PDFs - Not (always) accessible

Please note there is an update to this article after new information from Microsoft.

Of course, to create an accessible PDF from Word, the Word document needs to be done properly, otherwise it doesn't matter what you use to create the PDF, it won't be accessible.

I had previously heard that Office 2007 (or 12 back then) was going to have built in PDF support, with tagging (i.e. accessible output). Not too long ago I installed Vista and Office 2007 on my work machine, but there was no sign of it. Then I found the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-in for 2007 Microsoft Office.

It would be great if you could just 'save as' (which itself is an improvement on having to remember that PDFs are print-outs) and create a PDF of your document from Word, Excel or Powerpoint.

Whilst preparing the materials for a course on accessibility PDFs, I thought I'd give it a go with a really simple document. The results initally looked great (apart from being several times the file size), but then I dug in a little.

Screen shot of Acrobat Pro showing the first page and the tags dialogue open. There is no text in the tags, everything is an image.

The document is very simple, with just headings, lists, paragraphs and images, but all the text is saved as images.

These images do have 'actual text', but that just strikes me as a work-around. According to Adobe's own Accessibility Techniques, 'Actual Text' is for:

text that will be sent to a screen reader. If text is entered, the entered text will be read, and not the text that may comprise the displayed document content. This property should be entered only if you want something other than the content of an element to be read by a screen reader. Basically, this is replacement text.

For comparison, 'Alternate Text' is additional or descriptive text that can be used to describe an image, formula, or other item in the document that does not translate naturally into text.

So it isn't wrong to use this attibute for passing text through to alternative readers, but why isn't it just text?

Compared to the same document created from Word 2003 & Acrobat 8:

Screen shot of the same document but showing text within each tag.

The difference it makes in a screen reader is fairly stark, even if you consider it technical accessible:

how

difficult

is

it

to

understand

like

this?

Because of all the separated images a screen reader can't tell what's a sentence and what's just a word. (These simple test documents can be made available if you want to check this.)

Worse still, the accessibility features built into Acrobat are useless:

I would say that this is a very misleading dialogue:

The Office 2007 PDF options dialogue, showing a tick for "Document structure tags for accessibility"

Given that the Office 2007 PDF pluggin is a free download (once you've paid for Office 2007 of course), I was hoping that most people internally could use that instead of paying the Adobe tax for accessible PDFs.

Unfortunately, without providing reasonably accessible output, I can't use or recommend that option.

Update - it's a font thing

Thanks to the quick responses from Microsoft, it turns out not to be as bad as initially thought. The use of a non-standard font seems to have triggered the use of bitmapped text. I changed the font to Arial, and the structure and text came out fine, possibly clearer than the Adobe version.

Screenshot of the acrobat file and tags dialogue open, showing a nice HTML like structure.

In comparison to the non-standard fonts version:

So, much better, although I can't work out why the image disappears.

However, half the reason we use PDF in the first place is that we can embed our (nicer) company font into documents we send out. The Microsoft test team are currently investigating why this font triggered the issue, but for now the advice (from me) has to be to use 'standard' fonts and test thoroughly for accessibility.