Accessible PDF with Microsoft Office

Barrierefreie Dokumente mit Microsoft Word

Insert content

When inserting content in Word, you have several options. You can write text directly on a page, place it in the header or footer, or embed it using objects like text boxes and tables. Where you insert something affects whether an element can be read aloud by a screen reader or at what point the object is detected by assistive technologies.

1. The header and footer

Alle Elemente werden in Kopf- und Fußzeile unsichtbar für Hilfstechnologien in das PDF exportiert. Der Grund ist, dass es störend sein kann, wenn sich wiederholende Texte immer wieder vorgelesen werden.

These include, for example:

  • Letterheads with contact details (See Fig. 1)
  • Repetitions of the side chapters
  • The pagination

Therefore, you should avoid placing important information only in the header or footer. Examples of common mistakes include:

  • Transfer details such as the IBAN are only available in the footer.
  • Footnotes are manually inserted into the footer.

If so, this information should be repeated once in the running text or edited in the PDF.

Abb. 1: Die Kopf- und Fußzeile in Word

2. The content area

One advantage of Microsoft Word compared to other programs such as Adobe InDesign or Microsoft PowerPoint is that content can simply be written directly onto the document page without having to place text boxes or content boxes on the page.

When content is integrated in this way, it is also generally captured by assistive technologies and read aloud at the point where it was placed.

The order in which texts are interpreted and read aloud is the same as the order in which the texts are written:

Almost all writing systems in the European cultural sphere are horizontal, right-to-right scripts, meaning that successive characters are written from left to right. Successive lines are written from top to bottom.

Davon ausgenommen sind die Kopf- und Fußzeile. Auf der gezeigten Seite (Abb. 2) würde beispielsweise zuerst die Überschrift "Einleitung" an erster Stelle vorgelesen werden. Anschließend kommen nacheinander die Textabschnitte 2, 3 und 4.

Zusammengefasst: Hier wird alles maschinenlesbar ins PDF exportiert. Somit sind die Inhalte durch Hilfstechnologien erfassbar. Weicht die logische Lesereihenfolge von der benannten Reihenfolge ab, muss man das Dokument in einem Expertensystem wie Adobe Acrobat Pro nacharbeiten.

Fig. 2: The content area in Word

3. Textkästen

Wenn zusätzlich Text-Kästen oder Objekte wie Bilder oder Tabellen eingefügt werden, muss folgendes unterschieden werden:

  1. The building blocks are inserted in the header and footer: As described previously, the content here will not be machine-readable in the PDF. Therefore, assistive technologies will not be able to access this content.
  2. The building blocks are integrated into the page/page content: The objects are read aloud, but must be anchored in the reading order. To do this, the object anchor is placed between the sections where the object should be read aloud.

Abb. 3: Textkästen in Word verankern

Semantik

Texts are visually structured through font size, font type, position, and additional formatting such as bold. This helps distinguish between a heading, a simple paragraph, and a list. This semantic information is crucial for text comprehension.

Therefore, they are not only visually embedded in accessible documents. It is important for assistive technologies that they are also technically readable. Here, a very important distinction must be made:

  • Improvisation: If you design content purely visually, adjusting parameters like font color, font size, bold, and position, no meaningful machine-readable information is generated in the background. For example, if a screen reader always reads out the font size of a heading, the listener would have to remember how that font size relates to other text sections to determine whether it's a chapter heading, a subheading, or body text. Aside from the fact that it would be very cumbersome to remember all the font sizes, this method would only work if the headings in the layout are ordered by size.
  • The button rule: Therefore, a clear assignment is necessary. Many programs automatically generate these technical attributes to identify content for their own purposes. For this reason, you should always use buttons for content that are named after the corresponding semantic class. For example, if you want to insert a footnote, click the "Insert Footnote" button. Word needs the information that this is a footnote in order to automatically number it sequentially. This information is not only stored technically in Word but is also passed on to the PDF if the export settings are configured accordingly.

Fig. 4: Various examples of the button rule in Word. Lists, tables, images, tables of contents, and footnotes can be inserted in a machine-readable format using the respective buttons in the ribbon.