Using Word's Properties to flow into a more accessible PDF

Creating accessible PDFs can be difficult and tedious. We strongly suggest making your source document as accessible as it can be if you're going to convert to a PDF.

Identify the Title in Properties

If you've authored your material in Word, you can use any save function to move a .doc(x) to a PDF and carry over many accessible properties of that file. Before you do this, make sure you've identified the Title in Properties. We use the Office 2019 Suite and Microsoft Office 365 here at Swarthmore, and you can:

Mac

1. select File,

2. Scroll down and select Properties,

3. Choose the Summary tab,

4. Title your file using the Title field,

5. Click OK.

Windows

1. select File,

2. an Info screen will open.

3. Find the Properties section.

4. Title your file using the Title field,

5. Hit return or enter,

6. then Save the document.

See also: View or change the properties for an Office file | Microsoft Support

Identify the Language

If you've authored your material in Word, you can use any save function to move a .doc(x) to a PDF and carry over many accessible properties of that file. Before you do this, make sure you've identified the Language the file is in. We use the Office 2019 Suite and Microsoft Office 365 here at Swarthmore, and you can:

Overall

If you’d like to identify a particular language you most often write and edit in, follow these steps:

1. Open a Microsoft Office program.

2. Select File,

3. then scroll down to select Options.

4. In Word Options, choose Language.

5. In the Choose your Editing Language section,

6. Choose or Add your editing language.

7. In the Choose your Display Language section,

8. select the option to Match your operating system

9. OR choose another language to set as default.

10. Click OK.

Now the program will default to the language you selected.

Mac or Windows

1. select Review,

2. Scroll down and select Language.

3. Choose the Set proofing language

4. and make your appropriate selection.

5. Click OK.

See also: Add an editing or authoring language or set language preferences in Office | Microsoft Support

If you have specific sections of text in different languages, select that text and indicate the language using the steps above for just that selection.

Convert the more accessible file to PDF (if you must)

And then, you can save the Word document as a PDF in multiple ways and the Title will carry over.

• Use Adobe’s Word plugin to produce the PDF.

• Choose save as PDF from the File menu.

• Select Export and Create Adobe PDF from the File menu.

• Choose Save As from the File menu; select PDF from the drop down; and save.

It will not be the most accessible to move .doc(x) files to PDF. There are a number of steps even still that require going into the PDF to edit metadata and tags, for instance.

See also:

• Creating accessible pdfs [LinkedIn Learning Video]

• Changing the title of an Adobe PDF | Swarthmore ITS Solutions

• Changing the global language of an Adobe PDF | Swarthmore ITS Solutions

• Creating PDFs

Common Pitfalls

• Thinking that the filename is the title. 

• Printing to PDF instead of saving as a PDF.

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