RE: Accessible PDF forms versus forms in Word doc

Love Karen's take here - and as a screen reader user myself, the Word forms experience is garbage 99% of the time. And while PDF forms have their share of issues too, the experience is exponentially better in the PDF space than would be in Word.

Karen: Do you have any walkthroughs, tutorials or insight on working with ABBYY for forms? We just moved our alt format process at Texas A&M University to ABBYY 15 (after holding onto our version of ABBYY 12 until the last possible moment) ... and I’m blown away at how much has improved with this latest version. It's a powerhouse! Would happily pay for something if you have anything out there because, while my alt format team are a bunch of whiz kids with our textbooks, I'd like our professional FT staff to be able to get into ABBYY and do more with forms and PDF accessibility.

Thanks all!
Justin


-----Original Message-----
From: Karlen Communications <info@karlencommunications.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2020 2:11 PM
To: 'Sailesh Panchang' <spanchang02@gmail.com>; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: Accessible PDF forms versus forms in Word doc

I generally discourage adding the actual form controls in Word. I teach how to make an accessible Word template for PDF forms and that template can be used as alternate format if needed/requested depending on legislative requirements.

With the old Word ActiveX form controls you have to protect some of the document often containing instructional text. If the screen reader or Text-to-Speech doesn't consistently read the Status Bar ToolTips then the form is not usable. While improvements have been made to the inherently inaccessible Content Controls which replaced the old ActiveX form controls as of Word 2007, the improvements are not backward compatible with previous versions of Word (prior to Word 2016). 

The Accessibility Checker in Office 2016 flags protected documents as an accessibility barrier.

My recommendation is always to create the template with no underline and no symbols for radio buttons or check boxes in Word, save as a tagged PDF, validate the accessible PDF, add the form controls in Acrobat, PowerPDF or now ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 and do any touch ups in Acrobat. With ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 you have to add the form controls in Acrobat. If you are working in Acrobat, you just manually add them anyway. If you start with an untagged PDF, you have more cleanup of the text/questions and instructions. Starting with a tagged PDF lets you use the Find tool to add the <Form> Tags where they need to be.

If someone doesn't want to do PDF, I suggest HTML but for those who need to take their time filling in a form or need/want to keep a copy on their computer, I tend to go with PDF.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: Sailesh Panchang <spanchang02@gmail.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2020 1:50 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Accessible PDF forms versus forms in Word doc

Greetings A11y Listers,
Is it easier to find people with skills for creating accessible PDFs than accessible Office Word docs?
The reference is to e-docs that have forms with textboxes, radio / checkboxes, where controls need to be associated with instructional text and generally make WCAG  2.0 (AA) conformant.
Views on usability of accessible PDF forms vs. Word forms across platforms and devices by keyboard-only / vision impaired users  are welcome too.

Thanks very much,
Sailesh

Received on Thursday, 24 September 2020 03:52:21 UTC