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Creating Accessible PDFs on Mac without Acrobat Pro?

By RedMaple, 5 January, 2016

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I work at a university and one of my initiatives is getting faculty to use/post only accessible PDFs for students. Initially I was going to train my faculty in making accessible word documents and exporting them as PDF, however, this is a Mac campus and I've discovered that all the tagging you do in Word gets lost when you export to PDF on a MAC (ugh!!). I'm trying to find solutions, but struggling. Users could do all the work in Word on their MACs and open and convert to PDF on a PC, but this is an extra step that will be difficult to get them to take AND there are currently no public PCs on campus for them to use. Faculty do not have access to Acrobat Pro either, nor do I think most of them are savvy enough to use it even if I was able to get it for them.

Are there any easy (from a user perspective) and cheap solutions for this problem? Someday I may be able to get a public PC lab put in, but that will be a huge project itself. Getting faculty to produce accessible PDFs was going to be a huge win for accessibility on campus, but we can't demand it, if we can't offer a way to implement it :(

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Yes. You open the PDF, if it

By samantha

7 years 2 months ago

Yes. You open the PDF, if it has text in it. It should open in preview. Once done, press command A, to select all, then command C to copy. Open Apple skript editor, or skript editor, on macbook air. Then create a new file, and paste it in. Once done, select all and cut using command A and command X. Close the file. When prompted, delete it. Open what ever word processor you use. Create a new document, and paste it. Save it as what you like :)

I don't think that helps. The

By RedMaple

7 years 2 months ago

In reply to Yes. You open the PDF, if it by samantha

I don't think that helps. The step that is creating the PDF is erasing the tagging (the alt text, the header tags, etc), so once I have a PDF to open somewhere, it is already useless.

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