MS Word footer ends up first item in content reading order when converted to PDF

[Matthew Clara]

Anyone else have this problem?  We have a department wide letterhead template (MS Word 2010) with header and footer and when converted to PDF using Acrobat Pro XI (v11.0.13.17), the footer ends up at the top of the reading order list.  Anyway to stop that from happening?

[a_C_student · Accepted solution]

Hi Matthew, when you refer to the reading order, are you looking in the Content Pane, the Z-Order Pane, or the Tags Pane - or maybe somewhere else? The Tags Pane provides the reading order for Assistive Technology (AT). As a general rule repeating footers should be marked as background artifacts, so they will not appear in the Tags Pane and will be ignored by AT. In my experience conversion from Word to PDF sometimes does a better job than other times, but there is always some amount of manual fix-ups to do to achieve an accessible PDF.

[Matthew Clara]

Thanks for the response.  I was working primarily in the Content Pane.  If the Tags Pane is for assistive technology, what's the content pane for?  Thanks again.

[a_C_student]

For me, the Content Pane comes in handy if a page element seems to disappear because it is hiding behind another page element. Usually this happens with text on a shaded box, for example. Moving the text after the shaded box in the Content Pane causes it to re-appear. Also, on rare occasions I need to artifact some element that is not visible on the page - I can usually find it in the Content Pane. And I believe the Adobe Read Out Loud feature uses the Content Pane Order.