“There Is No Way Around the Software” – PDF Accessibility as Routine in a Federal Ministry

At the Federal Ministry for Innovation, Mobility and Infrastructure (BMIMI) in Austria, Stefan Wernig is responsible for creating accessible documents. Each year, he oversees around 400 publications, ranging from short fact sheets to comprehensive brochures with more than 100 pages. The goal is to provide all publications efficiently, in a legally compliant manner, and fully accessible.

In addition to producing documents himself, Stefan Wernig also supports specialist departments in implementation and shares his expertise as a lecturer at the Federal Academy of Public Administration in the field of “accessible documents.”

To manage the large volume of documents, the ministry relies on axesWord to create accessible PDFs directly from Microsoft Word. The conversion speed and reliability are particularly convincing.

By optimizing internal Word templates for use with axesWord, PDFs can now be created in seconds. Post-processing effort has been almost completely eliminated.

axesPDF has also become an integral part of the toolkit. It is used to give Word and InDesign documents the finishing touches or to subsequently make external PDFs accessible. The integrated validation and screen reader simulation help identify and correct problem areas quickly. According to Wernig, the function for correctly linking tables of contents and the convenient editing of bounding boxes for images are particularly helpful.

Today, creating accessible documents at BMIMI is no longer a specialized topic but part of everyday work. axesWord and axesPDF make it possible to handle large volumes of documents with consistent quality and minimal effort.

Wernig sums it up: “Sooner or later, there is no way around the software.”