Building Better Word-to-PDF Accessibility Workflows

The structural and styling choices you make in Microsoft Word directly affect how accessible your final PDF will be. This session shows you how to build accessibility into your documents from the start so remediation becomes faster, cleaner, and far less frustrating later in the workflow.

Join Shawn Jordison for a practical walkthrough of creating accessible Word documents designed for PDF export. Learn how to use styles, headings, lists, tables, metadata, and Word’s built-in accessibility tools to create more organized, compliant, and user-friendly documents. Shawn will demonstrate real-world workflows, common mistakes that create accessibility problems downstream, and repeatable strategies you can apply immediately with your own files.

Whether you create documents yourself or receive Word files from others, you’ll leave with a clearer understanding of how accessible document workflows should begin before remediation even starts.

Key takeaways:

• Building Word documents with accessibility in mind from the start
• Applying styles, headings, lists, and tables more effectively
• Identifying common Word formatting mistakes that create PDF accessibility problems
• Using Word’s Accessibility Checker and built-in accessibility features with greater confidence
• Creating cleaner, more successful, accessible PDF exports from Word documents