Help making PDFs accessible

Good afternoon. I am a Webmaster for the Douglas-Omaha Technology
Commission, which is the joint IT department for the City of Omaha and
Douglas County, Nebraska.
 
We have an ongoing problem for which I can't find a solution.
 
Many of our departments use Publisher 2003 to create newsletters and
flyers. It's very easy to save a Publisher document as a PDF. But that
PDF is not ADA compliant.
 
When Publisher saves a PDF, it converts the documents into hundreds of
jpeg images. When you open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat 8 and run an
accessibility check, you get an error message that you're missing
hundreds of Alt tags. When you use the TouchUp Object tool to select a
graphic, it shows that the image has been divided into many smaller
graphics. Also, you can't update the image properties to add an Alt tag.
 
I have been to both the Microsoft and Adobe Web sites and found no
helpful information. I've also done the requisite number of Google
searches, and still no answer. So I'm hoping you can point me to a
solution to this problem. 
 
We know how to make these things work in Word. And I've figured out how
to do the conversion in InDesign as well. But there are documents that
need to be created that are too complicated for Word. And most of the
people in our offices don't know how to use something as complicated as
InDesign, and/or can't afford to buy it.
 
Any information you can give me will be greatly appreciated.
 
 
Theresa Cassiday
Webmaster
DOT.Comm
408 S. 18th Street
Omaha, NE 68102
(402) 444-3292