Accessible PDF with Microsoft Word

We are regularly asked whether you can turn a Word document into an accessible PDF. You can, provided you take into account a number of conditions and limitations. We explain these in this article.

Capabilities of Microsoft Word

Microsoft's Office package is still the most widely used type of office software, both in governments and in business. A lot of documents are written in Microsoft Word and a large proportion of them are saved as PDF documents, for example to publish on a website.

The latest version of Office, which is now called Microsoft 365, offers you as a writer quite a few options for creating accessible documents. To name a few important ones:

  • By using styles for headings, these texts are actually recognised as headings.

  • An enumeration list is often already created automatically for you. If it isn't, you can use the bulleted list option.

  • For an image, you can add a text alternative. You can also specify that an image is decorative.

  • If you insert a table, the cells in the first row and in the first column are already marked as table headers for you. You can change this if necessary.

  • If you enter a title in the file properties, it can also be recognised when it becomes a PDF.

  • The accessibility checker allows you to see if there are any accessibility problems in your document.

  • By saving the document properly, the necessary information will also be included in the final PDF document.

Saving a Word document properly is very important. This is because if you do not save the document properly as a PDF, someone using auxiliary software will unfortunately not be able to use it. Read our tips on page Making PDF accessible? Here's how to do it for more information.

Earlier versions, such as Office 2016 and older, unfortunately offer fewer features and therefore do make it more difficult or even impossible to publish accessible PDF documents.

Limitations of Microsoft Word

Unfortunately, Microsoft Word 365 also has some limitations. These include:

  • When inserting an image, an automatically generated text alternative often comes up. Usually this is not a good description of the image and you have to edit it manually. The accessibility check cannot help you with this.

  • If you let a paragraph or bulleted list continue on the next page, in the final PDF it will be divided into two paragraphs or two bulleted lists and that is not correct. You should therefore avoid this as much as possible or adjust it afterwards in a programme such as Adobe Acrobat Pro.

  • Complex tables, for example with multiple table headings and merged cells, unfortunately cannot be made accessible from within Microsoft Word. You should also avoid these as much as possible or adjust them afterwards in another programme.

  • Microsoft Word has an option for inserting footnotes. As long as you have one footnote on a page, this works fine. With multiple footnotes, however, it does not. This is because the footnotes are put together in the reading order, whereas you want a footnote at a place right after each reference.

  • While we mentioned the accessibility check in the options, it is worth noting that this check is not complete. If there are no errors here, there may still be accessibility problems.

It is not directly a limitation of Microsoft Word, but good to realise that you should not put unique content in the header or footer. This is because this content will be skipped when you have the PDF document read out, for example. Actually, this is exactly the intention, because you don't want to hear the organisation name and page number on every page, for example.

An accessible PDF with Microsoft Word can

As long as you take into account the above limitations and use the features that Microsoft Word offers you, in our opinion, you can create an accessible PDF with Microsoft Word just fine. In other cases, you will often need to make some adjustments in another programme.

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