[Athen] [EXT]Re: PDF remediation help

[Deborah Armstrong]

I've been following this thread, and need to share something a co-worker discovered.
When the source document is Word, but the user decides to convert it to PDF using older versions of Office on the Mac, we get the situation where the PDF is an image with poorly tagged text - often  with words run together or single letters on each line.
The sighted person doing the conversion can easily see this without needing to use a screen reader by simply saving the resulting PDF as text and looking at the text which results.
The solution is to use a modern, fully updated version of Office on the Mac, or on Windows to save the Word document as a PDF. Then you get a PDF with the full image but also all the underlying text, properly formatted.
We have a whole raft of PDF files on our intranet that someone saved with an old version of Office on the Mac, but when the source documents were converted to PDF with a modern version of Office, no remediation was required.
So before anyone wastes time remediating a PDF find out if the source exists and if it can simply be converted with more modern software. I do wish people would stop using outdated software!

--Debee
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