RE: suggested tools for office/pdf remediation

I use the Accessibility checking tools built into Microsoft Office in combination with manual testing and use Office features to address accessibility directly in Microsoft Office documents.  Microsoft has some good articles on addressing accessibility in Office documents (although they do not go far enough). https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/make-your-word-documents-accessible-to-people-with-disabilities-d9bf3683-87ac-47ea-b91a-78dcacb3c66d

Jonathan

From: Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2022 8:29 AM
To: Wilcox, Lisa - REE-ERS, Washington, DC <lisa.wilcox@usda.gov>; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: suggested tools for office/pdf remediation

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We don't use any tools for remediating or testing Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. I don't even know if there are any tools that help if you want to publish in those file formats.

For PDFs, we do what we can in the source document and do almost everything else in Acrobat. Axes QuickFix is useful for a handful of things that Acrobat can't do.

We use PAC3 and the Commonlook plug-in for Acrobat for testing. Both test for PDF/UA conformance (although they give different results!). The Commonlook plug-in says that it tests for WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, but it only tests a small subset of the WCAG success criteria. If a client wants WCAG conformance, we do pretty much all the testing manually.

Commonlook and a few other companies sell tools that help you create accessible PDFs from Word. However, they are extremely expensive and we have never been able to justify buying them. These tools often say that they will achieve WCAG conformance, but this is not true. They only enable you to pass the WCAG tests that an automated tool can do. Manual testing always reveals a lot of non-conformances that still need to be fixed.

The bottom line is that tools don't help you much. Document remediation is a very highly skilled activity (when done properly). Acrobat doesn't do much automatically - it just enables you to access all the tags and properties, but you need to know what to do. Unfortunately, much of the information that has been published is incomplete and/or incorrect, so you ought to pay for training from the handful of people who have specialised in this for a long time.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Wilcox, Lisa - REE-ERS, Washington, DC <lisa.wilcox@usda.gov<mailto:lisa.wilcox@usda.gov>>
Sent: 14 September 2021 21:19
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: suggested tools for office/pdf remediation

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions to the best tools to remediate pdfs, office documents and excel files?
We are looking to expand accessibility testing and looking into tools.
I appreciate the advice.
Kindest regards,
Lisa

Lisa G. Wilcox (she/her/hers) / Web Design Lead / FAC-COR Level II
Certified Scrum Professional - Scrum Master
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lisa.wilcox@usda.gov<mailto:lisa.wilcox@usda.gov> / 202-999-9619
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