- In this video, I'll go over how to create a PDF form from a Word document. Right now we have the word-to-pdf file open in Microsoft Word. I just want to point out that this sample form with table is a heading one style. School Information is heading two, as is Personal Data. To create a PDF from this, let's go to the Acrobat ribbon, select Create PDF, and this will open a PDF version of that form in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Let's start by going over the accessibility tags. I'm going to use my arrow keys to go down this tag tree. Starting at the top we have our H1 that carried over from the heading one style in the Word document. Then the H2, we have a table next and then a paragraph tag, Personal Data, which is an H2, the name field, preference direction, and then we have a couple of figures and another sort of placeholder paragraph tag down at the bottom.

So the first thing I want to do is clean up these accessibility tags a little bit. This is before we go in to create the form fields. Let me show you what's going on here. So this is an empty container. right click and change this to an artifact. Artifacts are ignored by assistive technology, so that's why it disappeared from the accessibility tags area. Now this is an empty tag, so I'm going to go ahead and right click and delete this paragraph tag. The figure in this tag tree should also be ignored by assistive technology. So we're going to mark this as an artifact by right clicking, change tag to artifact and I'll go ahead and delete that inside here.

Looks like we have a couple of empty containers. Let me command select those two to deal with them at the same time. I will artifact those and then delete the spans. Okay, and this span actually contains the Night text. I'm going to pull that up to below this paragraph tag and then this span can be deleted as well. Okay, now we're onto this figure for the day. Let me change that to artifact, delete the figure and then looks like it treated the Day text in the same way.

It added some empty containers here, which I will artifact and then I will delete the empty span tags, move day up and delete that remaining span tag. Okay, moving on to Preference, change this to artifact, delete that span. I'm going to move this container up and get rid of the extra span tag. Alright, actually let me show you a quick little trick. If you press the option, hold the option key down and click this little caret here. It will expand everything below it.

Okay, so this one I will artifact and delete this name. Okay, I'm going to do something in the reading order panel real quick. That's the name one. I'm going to pull up the Reading order panel and marquee or highlight the name and select the text paragraph button here. What that does is separate out the name text from those underscores. So let me go back to the accessibility panel there.

If you looked under the P, there's Name now and then here is the underscore and the colon. I'm going to go ahead and artifact that because I don't want screen reader to read underscores aloud. Okay, so this name can go under the paragraph tag and then this paragraph tag can be deleted. Alright, so that was that one. And then under heading option, click. Okay, this one artifact. I'm going to move this one up to the H2.

Actually, I can delete this whole thing right here and I'm going to skip the table for now and just deal with the H2 and let me delete these two spans. Okay, let me move that up there. Artifact this and delete these two spans. Whoops. Okay, so that is pretty cleaned up. Let's take a look at the table. So it has the table, header, row right there. Let just see what this header roll looks like. So there's a lot of unnecessary empty containers that we will artifact. And then let me just delete these empty spans and I'm going to move this school up here and delete that span.

Oh, same with the student population and zip code. Let me move them up a little bit. No need to nest them so much. So let me get those two empty spans outta there. All right, so that header row, I'm going to close that up again. Option click, or I can just click that one. Oh, option click probably would've been better here or no, I can just click that. Okay, table body. Let's take a look at this one. Same thing. Let me do a little cleanup here as well. Command select to select all three of those. Let we artifact them and then delete these empty spans. I'm going to leave the P tags there for now.

Oh, here's more down here. Lemme see if I can, I'll just do one row at a time so I don't lose my place artifact and then delete. Let me close that row up. And let's take care of this one artifact. The empty containers, delete the empty span tags. Same thing for the next row. Remediating PDFs is a time consuming process. So if you have a form that can be put online as just an HTML page, that would be probably better than trying to create an accessible PDF form. Okay, I think I got all of these now. Let me close this row up. I'll close that. Okay, so we've cleaned up our accessibility tags. Let's save.

So I'm going to save this document and let's prepare our form by selecting over here in the left hand panel, prepare a form, select that I'm leaving auto detect form field as on, and that this document does not require signatures. So I will leave this unchecked. Now let me select this button. Create form. And Acrobat has now opened up the fields panel on the right and put in some form fields for us automatically. Our rows are labeled. These are all sort of the names of the form fields. This one's called name.

Here's, I assume these are radio buttons. Let's look at, oh yes, they are radio buttons. Here they are. It's named at preference select one. The zip code row four is after our radio buttons for some reason. Let me move this back up here And let me right click on the first form field in the document and look at properties. So you'll see the name school row one and then under tool tip, this is the description of this form field. Very important to have tool tips. This is what will be read by your screen reader. Let me get rid of the underscores. And you'll want to do this for every form field in here. You can just select the next form field and it'll automatically go in this little window to that. You can see it's highlighted. So you want to go through and clean up the tool tips for each of those. I will not do that in this video, we'll just leave it like that.

And then let me check down here. Name. That's good. And then for radio buttons, select the first radio button, the name of your radio buttons. If you want them to behave as a group, it needs to have the same name. So this radio button group, I'll just call it preference. And in the tool tip, let's put Preference: Day. Under options for this radio button for day, the choice radio button choice should reflect what option it is. So this one already did that: day. If I select the Night radio button, you'll see that the radio button choice is night. And if you go to general, we need to make sure again that the name is the same as the one for Day. And for the tool tip, let's put Preference: Night since this is for the option for night.

Let's go ahead and save this PDF document and run a accessibility check on it. So let's go back and prepare, select, prepare for accessibility, check for accessibility. All right, we have the accessibility checker panel open on the right. Looks like there are a few issues here. Let's look under forms tagged. Form fields failed. And if you expand this, it'll show all these fields have not been tagged under page content tab order has failed. Tag annotations failed. Let me close that back up. And under document we have three things that have failed or one that has failed and two that need manual checking.

Alright, let's go back to the tagged form fields. What you need to do now is go to the accessibility tags panel in this menu, select find. Now over here table is highlighted right now, I actually don't want that. I'd rather actually let me add a new tag. This new tag is going to sort of be a container for us. So it's not going to remain in the document, it's only for this process that we're about to do. I'm going to just add a H6 and highlight, select that. And then in the find menu that we pulled up, we are going to find unmarked annotations, Select find. And what Acrobat is doing now is it's going through and it's going to find all the unmarked annotations in our document. Those are all of our form fields.

So when you, when it starts, select the tag element button, it'll move to the next field. Just keep clicking tag element so you, it'll show you where it is right now here. So keep going and then it's done Select. Okay, and close this and let's expand our H6. And what you will see here is all the OBJR tags for our form fields. Now this is great, but these need to be put in the proper nested in the proper tags in our form. So let's go ahead and do that. I will start with this preference. OBJR that's highlighted. It is the one that goes with Night. Let's find that. Here's Night here. And we will want to add a form label or a form tag. So highlight night, right click, click new tag and select form. Select, okay.

And what you will want to do is select the night radio button. Cut that. So command X or just select form though. A tag we just created under night, right Click and paste child. You'll see that this is now right where it needs to be. Okay, let me close that up. I'll open this one for day. Same thing, right click new tag form. Let's go to that radio button for day cut, select form paste child. All right, let's see what's next here. That's the instruction. We'll leave that. Okay, here's name. This is our name field. Let me go ahead and right click, add a new tag form tag. Let me grab that name. OBJR tag. Select form Paste child. So we're just going through and putting our OBJR form tags in the proper parts of our document here in the tag tree. So all right, here we go. We are going to go into the table now. And let's see here. Let's start with row. Let's start with row four since fours are here anyway. All right, this, let me open them all up.

So this P tag, I think what we can do here is select all of these P tags. We left them in there as a placeholder, right click select properties, and then in object properties in tag, change the type from paragraph to form. Select close. And now they've all turned into form tags. I will now take, let's see, we have our 1, 2, 3 form fields. I'm going to cut those. I'll paste them as child under this one form here. And then I'm just going to drag this. One was for school. The next one is student population. Let me just move that here. And then the zip code was the last one here.

Oh, did I do that wrong? Let's see. There's that one. Okay, no, that's right. This one is the student population and this one is school row. Perfect for row four. Let me close that row up and move to the third row. Same thing. I've, these paragraph tags were just placeholders. Let me select all of them by holding down the command key and clicking. And then I am going to right click properties. Change this to form. I can type it in, but you have to make sure you capitalize the F. And then let me take these three items, cut, paste them here as child, and then move the items where they need to go under nested under the forms. Okay, that row is done.

Same thing with the second row. Now this H6, it's served its purpose. I am going to go ahead and delete that. All right, so now let's run the accessibility checker again and see where we are at. Okay, now our tagged form fields have passed. Page content, tab, order failed. This you can fix right here. If you right click, select fix, and then tab order has now been set to match the structure. Click. Okay.

Another way to to fix this problem is to go into the pages panel. And if you right click on your page and go to page properties. This tab order is using the use document structure by default, I don't think Acrobat actually selects that, and which is why the accessibility checker fails that particular test. But you, we can verify here that it has been fixed.

Let's go back to the accessibility checker. Now we're at the document portion title. Let's right click there and fix that here. Acrobat has grabbed the H1 as its title. I think that's fine. We'll select. Okay, logical Reading Order needs a manual check. So to do this, you need to go to the reading order panel here. And let's go ahead and expand this and just make sure using the arrow keys that These are going to be read in the order that we want. And this seems, yes, that seems good to me.

So we go back to the accessibility checker and we right click and click select Pass. And then the last thing we need to do is check color contrast. This color contrast, the blue that's used in the headings. And then just the black text. These are all, these are all okay against a white background. So I will right click on Color Contrast and Select Pass as well. Let me go ahead and save this document. And for good measure. Let me check for accessibility again. And you'll see that we have nothing sort of highlighted. There's no flag over here in the Accessibility Checker panel.