Add hyperlinks

- [Instructor] Whenever you have hyperlinks in a Word document, it's important that you properly identify them so that those links become accessible in the PDF that is exported from that document. Let's take a closer look at this. I'm going to scroll down a little bit to page two. In this case, I have a link here that is an email link, but a web link would work in exactly the same way. What I'm going to do before I do anything, I'm going to export this as a PDF. So, I'm going to go to the Acrobat tab, actually, before I do that, if I go to Preferences, keep in mind, I have Add Links enabled, so that's the important thing to make this work.

Now, when I create a PDF, go ahead and put that in my folder here, you're going to notice that when I go down to page two, I'll zoom in to make this a little bit easier to see here, the email is identified there and you'll even notice that if you hover over that link, it is, in fact, a clickable link. So, if I were to click on this, more than likely it'll open my default email application, but in the case of a web hyperlink, it's going to open up your web browser.

Now, here's the thing about this. This is actually a function of Acrobat itself. It's actually a preference that you can change, but basically, any implicit hyperlink, meaning, a hyperlink that's spelled out, so in the case of an email address here or if it said www.landonhotel.com, that hyperlink is automatically detected by Acrobat. The unfortunate thing is that it's not accessible, and to show you this, I'm just going to highlight some of this text using my selection tool.

If I go to the Tags pane, I'll just click on the option button and say Find Tag from Selection. You're going to notice that this is essentially just tagged as a paragraph and that's really all you have, so remember what that looks like because we're going to make a change and then re-export this PDF. I'm going to go ahead and close that, we'll go back to Word and let's go down to that hyperlink again. Now, to properly remediate a hyperlink, and I'm just going to zoom in a little bit further so I can see this, to make a correct hyperlink, what I'm going to do is select this text and if I right-click on that, I can choose Hyperlink.

And in here we can create a hyperlink to a webpage and we can even create a hyperlink to an email address down here, so I'm going to choose that option. And so, I'm going to type in the email address that I want this to go to, so I'm going to type in here [email protected] and I can even put a subject in here if I want to. So, I might put something like Inquiry from 2018 Employee Manual.

This is kind of a weird thing that Word does. For the text to display, it should really just show the email address, so I need to just edit this and clean this up a little bit. It should really just say [email protected], there we go, that looks better. While we're in here, another thing that I like to show people is that the Acrobat Accessibility Checker doesn't check for this, but PDF/UA does and it could be a bit of a pain because PDF/UA wants you to have alternate text for every hyperlink in the document, and that can really be a beast to do at the end of the process.

But when you're in the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box, what we could do is click the ScreenTip button and this allows me to add alternate text to the hyperlink that I'm generating, which is really, really cool. And so, for the ScreenTip, usually when I'm linking to a webpage, I'll just go to that webpage and grab the title information of that webpage. In the case of an email address, I'll probably just put something like contact human resources at Landon Hotels, you know, something like that, just to provide a description of where the link is going.

And when I click OK and then OK again, you can see that it has generated the hyperlink for me. You can pick and choose whether you want the underline to appear or if you want the look and feel of that to change at all. What you'll notice is that when you come over here and open up your Styles pane, there is a hyperlink character style that has been created and that has been applied to that text. So, rather than change it manually each time, you can just come in here and modify the style, and I could tell it to not have the underline.

And when I click OK, that way, all of the hyperlinks I create from here moving forward will not have that appearance. So, it's totally up to you, you could change the color if you want to, you have that flexibility. That looks pretty good to me. I'm just going to do a Save As on this and I'll call this Hyperlinks_finish 'cause I know Word is going to ask me to save this before I export it, and now I'll go to the Acrobat tab and choose Create PDF. And we'll just call this Hyperlinks and I'll replace the old one.

And the difference that you're going to notice this time, visually, it's not going to look much different, although you can see the hyperlink that we added has been included, but more importantly, if I find this tag in my Tags pane, what you're going to notice this time is that within that paragraph, there's a link tag that's been created for that object and inside of it, you'll find a Link - OBJR object, and that is what you're looking for.

That actually makes the hyperlink accessible to anybody using assisted software reading this document.