From the course: Creating Accessible PDFs

Introduction to creating accessible PDFs

From the course: Creating Accessible PDFs

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Introduction to creating accessible PDFs

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- [Instructor] In this course, I'll be showing you how to create accessible PDF files from a number of different applications. First off, I'll be showing you how to take an existing PDF file and make it fully accessible. To do this, I'll be using an application called Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is the subscription version of Adobe Acrobat that requires a monthly subscription to use the product. This version of Adobe Acrobat is what Adobe often refers to as the continuous release of Acrobat, because it's continually being updated periodically with new features. You will need the Pro version of Adobe Acrobat to follow along as the standard version does not contain the accessibility features that we'll be using to remediate PDF files. Now there's another version of Adobe Acrobat Pro that some organizations choose to purchase, which is called Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020. This version of Adobe Acrobat is the perpetual version of the product, which means it is not subscription-based. This product functions very similar to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, except the product is never updated with new features like Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is. For this reason, it's possible to experience some slight differences between the products as you follow along. From there, we'll move on to learning how to create accessible PDF files from the Microsoft Office applications, namely Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint. The version of the Office applications that I'm using in this course are the versions that ship with the Office 365 subscription. Word and PowerPoint 2016 work as well, as does Word and PowerPoint 2010. However, the 2010 version of the products had some limitations that you will certainly experience and notice if you're trying to follow along in this course. Finally, we'll be learning how to create accessible PDF files from Adobe InDesign. For this course, I'm going to be using the current version of Adobe InDesign, which is InDesign 2021. There have been some updates and improvements to features in InDesign in the current version, including some related to accessibility. If you're using an older version of Adobe InDesign, you should be fine, but it is possible that you could see a slight difference here and there. To make it as easy as possible for your copy of the InDesign file to look like mine, I've leveraged Adobe Fonts, which are online fonts that you can activate on your computer free of charge as part of your Creative Cloud subscription. Font licensing makes it difficult to share fonts freely with other users, so Adobe Fonts alleviates that problem. Now, some users may not have access to the Creative Cloud features and therefore may not be able to activate the fonts that I've used. Don't worry though. You're not out of luck. Simply choose type, find replace fonts on your computer. And this will bring up the find replace fonts dialog box. What you can do is select the missing font and then choose an appropriate replacement font down at the bottom. When you do, don't forget to enable the redefined style when changing all checkbox to update the appearance of the styles that use that font within that document. Doing this will allow you to follow along with me, although your documents certainly will look slightly different. If you're not running the latest versions of the applications that I've just described, which can happen for a variety of different reasons, you're not out of luck. I have several other PDF accessibility courses on LinkedIn Learning that cover older versions of products for creating accessible PDF files. If you're in this situation, simply head on over to linkedin.com/learning/instructors/chad- chelius. There, you can peruse the other PDF accessibility courses as well as others that will help you on your way to learning PDF accessibility. Most of the videos that I've created for this course are done using the Windows operating system. I've done this for several reasons. First, most users who are tasked with creating accessible PDF files tend to be on the Windows platform. The significance of the Windows platform isn't as important for the InDesign videos as InDesign is exactly the same on both platforms. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the Office products. Word and PowerPoint can have significant differences from one operating system to the other. And to be fair, the features for creating accessible PDFs on Windows is more robust than they are on the Mac platform, although you can still create accessible PDF files on the Mac OS as well.

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