Sharing

The best way to share your accessible Word document is as a document file (.DOCX). There are few reasons to use PDFs. PDFs are not user-friendly, accessible, or as secure as you think.

Who benefits from better sharing

PDFs are incredibly difficult and time-consuming to make accessible. Converting an accessible Word file to PDF may undo all the good work done to make your content inclusive and accessible.

Below are the number of accessibility issues present in a 5-page PDF created from an accessible Word document. On the left, Adobe’s built-in checker shows 19 issues (each of which may have multiple instances throughout the document). On the right, the PDF Accessibility Checker notes 3229 PDF Universal Accessibility standard errors and 3228 Web Content Accessibility Guideline errors. All of these errors require significant time and expert knowledge to fix.

How to fix it

If you feel you absolutely must use a PDF, follow the instructions on making accessible PDFs. Even if your document is accessible, the PDF copy may not be. You will need to make your PDF accessible which requires significant time and specialized knowledge. As you already have an accessible document, creating a PDF is only extra work which takes hours and causes significant frustration as Acrobat is not a pleasant or intuitive software to work in.

How to prevent it next time

Share your accessible Word document via OneDrive, email, or learning management system.

If you are concerned about security, learn how to share and export Word with various permission settings.