Accessibility when embedding PDF in Word document

Question

I'm creating a Word document at the moment, and there are a number of existing documents that need to be included as appendices. Some of them are Word documents, some are PDF. The most consistent approach I've found is to convert the appendix Word docs to PDF, and then convert all the PDFs to images and insert them as images into the main Word document.

I assume this makes all the appendices completely inaccessible to people who can't see. Is there a better solution or a best practice for embedding PDFs into a Word document so that they can be read by screen readers?

Answer 1

PDFs are generally pretty inaccessible for screen readers. Adobe has made some great efforts but unless you're generating the PDFs yourself it's more likely they won't be great.

Have you tried pulling the plain text out of the PDF? There's various tools you could use to accomplish this and if they don't work accessibility was probably off the table without a rewrite.