Hello, my name is Josh Seifert,  I am the information and communication technology accessibility program manager here at the University of Oregon. This is the first video in a short course that will walk you through how to create accessible PDFs. This video series covers the entire workflow from before you even create your PDF to the final checks you need to make for it to be fit for publication. It begins with how to export and not to export your files to be as accessible as possible using automated accessibility tools, optical character recognition, and how to verify the tags and logical reading order of your document. These topics should be relevant to everyone who creates PDFs so please watch all of them. Depending on your needs, there are also a couple videos on advanced topics, both forms and complex tables can be a little bit tricky so watch those videos if you work with those kinds of PDFs. The only requirement to follow along with this video is having access to Adobe Acrobat Pro. I use Adobe Acrobat DC Pro, which is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite available to all staff and faculty at the U of O. Tools like built-in PDF readers in Google Chrome, they just aren't sophisticated enough to do this kind of work. Lastly, I am deliberately trying to go at a pretty fast clip, there are plenty of in-depth resources on PDF accessibility. This is meant to be a lower barrier entry to what can seem like a big scary daunting topic, if after watching these videos you have questions, I'm glad to answer them or point you in the direction of a resource that can answer them. Just email me at ictaccess@uoregon.edu. 
OK, so enough of the administrative details, let's get to the content of this video.

OK, I have here a Word document, so I'm actually not starting with a PDF, I'm 

starting with my source document, and even if you don't use Word to author content, most of these principles will still apply. This isn't real content, this is just some sample stuff that I 
grabbed off of Wikipedia, some text, some headings, some images, lists, it's just meant to represent the type of content that you might export to PDF. It's important that your source document is as accessible as possible before exporting it to a PDF because it's easier to make any changes within this format, and if you exported your file to a PDF, 

made the changes when it's a PDF, if you need to go back to your source document and change some stuff, 
export again, well, you'd have to do your work all over again which can be frustrating. So, do it once in the source document format, and that will save you a lot of headache later on. There are multiple ways of exporting your files to PDFs. The best way to do it - oh, and I'm on the desktop version of Word, so if you're on the browser-based version Office 365, your options would be a little bit different. But if you're on desktop the best option is to use the Create Share Adobe PDF button under the home tab, or under the Acrobat tab the create pdf option. It's the same thing. This option is installed when you add Adobe Acrobat pro or, when you install Adobe Acrobat pro. so just click "create PDF". 

And I'm going to give this a more descriptive name, export example create pdf. It takes a second...

OK, there we go, and I'm also going to show you 

the wrong way to do this, so what you definitely don't want to do is use the print to pdf option,

and the reason why you don't want to do this is because it will take all the content in your document and then essentially save it as an image. There won't be any readable or searchable text, so if you rely on an assistive technology like a screen reader, it won't work, it'll be completely inaccessible to you. So again, don't do this, but just to demonstrate - print, print to pdf.

For some reason, it didn't even give me a file name,  export example print pdf.

OK, bring these back over here, and let's compare the two. So this was using the the create PDF option, and I can select the text, drag my cursor, and see the text gets highlighted. I can do a search for a text let's look for "university", great, so it's real text and it works with assistive technologies, and it's also just easier to use for everyone. Whereas if i look at my print to PDF option, you can immediately see that the quality of the text is lower, it looks kind of granular, and if I try and select it, I can't, this isn't even real text, it's just a picture of text, and so this is, well, this is pretty much useless, so don't use print to PDF. The last thing I  want to show you in this introductory video is how to add the tools that you will want to use when you're actually testing and fixing your PDFs. Either in the "more tools" sidebar or in the tools top nav icon or, excuse me, the top nav tab you have several tools that you can you can add. If you are scanning files, and have images of files, you will need the scan and OCR tool I already had the accessibility in my sidebar, but if I didn't, it's right here, so just add it. Action Wizard is also going to be useful, and if you work on PDFs with forms, you're going to want to add the prepare form option. So those are the four that I recommend if you are going to be testing PDFs: scan & OCR, accessibility, action wizard, and prepare form. And that's all we need to get started, so in the next video we're going to go over how to actually test these PDFs. Thanks for watching, and I will see you there.