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Making Your Bilingual Microsoft Word Table Accessible in PDF

Introduction

Welcome to the Accessibility Guy channel! In today’s post, we will be discussing how to convert a bilingual table created in Microsoft Word, which uses both English and Spanish, into a PDF while ensuring that it remains accessible. If you find this helpful, don’t forget to like and subscribe for more content on accessibility.

Video Overview

Step 1: Saving the Word File and Creating a PDF

To begin, save your Word file, which should have an accessible table with English, Spanish, and some PNG checkboxes. Next, under the Acrobat tab, select “Create PDF” and save the file. Since the table was already accessible in Microsoft Word, it should mostly transfer over to the PDF as accessible.

Step 2: Checking the Tags Panel

After converting the table to a PDF, open the tags panel on the far left side of the page to check if the table has been tagged properly. If you see a section tag and a blank p tag, you will need to make some adjustments to ensure the document is accessible.

Step 3: Making the Document Accessible

First, change the section tag to a document tag by right-clicking the section tag, selecting “Properties,” typing in the word “document,” and clicking “Close.” This will help the PDF pass PDF UA and WCAG accessibility standards. Next, change the blank p tag to an artifact by right-clicking the empty container and selecting “Change Tag to Artifact.” For the artifact type, choose “Page” and click “OK.” You can then delete the p tag.

Step 4: Cleaning Up the Table Structure

Go through the table cells to ensure proper formatting, and use the table editor to adjust table headers if necessary. Remove any blank p tags by right-clicking and changing the tag to an artifact. This process will help clean up the table structure, making it more accessible.

Step 5: Running the Accessibility Checker

Once the table structure is in place, run the accessibility checker to identify any issues that may still need to be addressed. In the case of the example provided, the nested alternate text failed. To resolve this, remove the alt text from the path tag, which should resolve the issue.

Step 6: Fixing Missing Alt Text

You can fix missing alt text by using the accessibility checker panel. Right-click on the issue and select “Fix” to add the alt text. Ensure that your alt text is descriptive and helpful for users.

Step 7: Verifying the Spanish Text

Make sure that the Spanish text has been properly recognized. To do this, select the Spanish text and use the “Find Tag from Selection” option. Right-click the p tag and ensure the language setting is correct.

Step 8: Final Checks

Save your file and run the accessibility checker one last time to ensure that everything is in order. If any issues remain, address them accordingly. In the example provided, the title was missing and was fixed by right-clicking and selecting “Fix.”

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we went through the process of converting a bilingual table in Microsoft Word into a PDF while ensuring its accessibility. Although there may be some challenges and bugs along the way, the final result should be a fully accessible PDF document that meets PDF UA and WCAG standards. Thank you for joining us on this journey, and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more accessibility content!

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ABBYY FineReader 16: Efficient PDF Editing and OCR

Video Overview

Welcome to the Accessibility Guy channel! We’re excited to share that ABBYY FineReader 16 is now on our computer. This latest version of ABBYY FineReader provides a stronger OCR engine and a host of PDF editing tools that can make document processing easier and more efficient. In this video, we’ll provide an overview of some of the most common workflows we personally work through when using ABBYY FineReader, so let’s jump right in.

Launching ABBYY FineReader PDF presents two main distinctions: the PDF document side and the OCR editor. While you can use the tool as a PDF editor, we want to focus on the OCR editor, as ABBYY FineReader has one of the strongest OCR engines on the market. It can assist you in converting file types, from PDF to Word, for example, or editing underlying text of a document and updating language settings.

When you launch the OCR editor, it will prompt you to open a file. Once you’ve selected your file, ABBYY FineReader will perform OCR on all the pages, and you’ll see a thumbnail section on the far left side of the screen that displays a snapshot of all the different pages in your document. The image panel displays the visual aspect of your PDF, and typically matches directly with the file. On the far right side of the screen, you’ll find the text area of ABBYY FineReader, where you can edit any of the underlying text of the program. If the OCR is poor, or you need to update a spelling mistake or add in information for acronyms, you can make changes in the text panel. Finally, a zoom panel appears on the bottom of the screen and will update depending on where you are in the image panel.

Before we dive into the settings, we like to adjust our settings. For example, we’ll take this document into a searchable PDF, so we need to adjust our PDF settings. To do that, we’ll select the Tools button and then select Options. This brings up the options window where you can set a variety of settings. In the General tab, you can choose when the OCR editor begins, or you can set up a scanning device to scan documents directly into ABBYY FineReader. We really want to spend most of our time under format settings.

Earlier, we mentioned that we’re going to be exporting to PDF, so we need to select our document type. We can adjust the settings for documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, text files, HTML ePubs, etc. For PDF, we’ll dive into the preferred settings. When creating accessible files, the first thing we want to adjust is the image quality. If you have a lot of images in your document, be sure to set custom. We’ll change our color control from automatic to “do not change image color,” as we don’t want any quality loss on our file. Then we’ll change the dropdown menu for quality to “quality loss not allowed” and select OK. We have additional settings that may not be relevant for you, such as creating PDF view a documents, which requires OCR. Additionally, we have the checkbox selected to use MRC compression, which also requires OCR. We like to apply the ABBYY precise scan to smooth characters on page images, which makes the font and images a bit crisper and easier to work with under searchable PDF settings.

We like to have the text under the page image, but you can adjust the settings for better results depending on the document you’re working with. We’ll have the option selected to create bookmarks from headings, create PDF tags, and ensure that our fonts are embedded. Additionally, you can set metadata in this way.

In conclusion, ABBYY FineReader 16 offers a range of OCR and PDF editing tools