This is the first in a series of posts on ways you can, and cannot, create accessible PDFs from various applications.

Microsoft Publisher is most commonly used as an authoring tool for creating print materials like fliers, handouts, and brochures. A common practice is to also create a PDF version of the brochure to either email to people or post online. So is it possible to create a fully accessible PDF using only Microsoft Publisher? In short, sometimes, but only for simple layouts and it will still take you a fair amount of work. If you just want the moral of the story without all the gory details, avoid using Microsoft Publisher to create PDFs because it is too difficult to do, unless the document has an extremely simple layout and structure. Here are the issues to contend with.

Alternative Text

As with most Microsoft products, any image in Publisher can have alternative text added to it. You need to simply select the image and chose “Format Picture” from the context menu. Then in the “Web” tab enter the alternative text.

The problem occurs when you want to mark an image as a decorative image and you just want to make the alternative text an empty string so screen readers will ignore it. The problem is you cannot set the alternative text to an empty string in Publisher. You basically have two choices

1. leave the alternative text field blank
2. put a single space in the alternative text field

The problem is different screen readers handle these cases differently. If you leave the alternative text blank, JAWS reads each of the images while NVDA ignores them. If you make the alternative text a single space, JAWS ignores the images but NVDA reads each image. VoiceOver ignores all alt text, whether it is empty, a single space, or has real text in it.

In this case there is no best solution for how to add alternative text for decorative images directly from within Publisher. The best solution involves going into Adobe Acrobat and explicitly setting the image as a background object.

Reading Order

This is the most tedious issue to deal with in Publisher. Screen readers will read the objects on the screen in the order they were created. Technically, screen readers read the objects in the order they appear in the stack (z-index). Screen readers will read items furthest back in the stack first and items closest to the front last. Armed with this knowledge you will now need to go through your entire document and systematically select each item individually and choose to “Bring to front”, starting with the first item that should be read first and ending with the last item to be read. The only way to check that you got it right is to open the document in Adobe Acrobat and either use the built-in “Read Out Loud” feature or use a screen reader. Of course, if you missed anything you will have to repeat the previous process almost in its entirety.