Five Tips for Creating Accessible Documents is part of the Extension Essentials series. This curated collection of resources and publications is designed to empower Extension professionals in delivering impactful programs, driving innovation, and fostering meaningful community engagement. This publication offers guidance on creating accessible documents to ensure inclusivity and understanding for all audiences, including those with disabilities.
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Here are five tips to help you make your documents more inclusive and user-friendly. #1: Use Heading Styles Five Tips for Creating Accessible Documents
Creating accessible documents ensures all users, including those with disabilities, can easily access and understand your content.
Heading styles ensure consistency and are key to improving document accessibility. They help screen readers navigate, make sections easier to find, and provide a clear structure for users with visual or cognitive disabilities. l Video tutorial: Using Styles for Document Structure (6:22) #2: Create Descriptive Hyperlinks Screen reader users can use a shortcut to bring up a list of hyperlinks in a document. Links need to be unique and descriptive to make sense when accessed as a list, without the surrounding text for context. Instead of “click here,” select meaningful text
(descriptive and unique text) and make that text the link. l Video Tutorial: Creating Descriptive Links (2:23) #3: Provide Alternative Text for Images
Screen readers need a text alternative to describe images for blind users. Text descriptions also help other learners understand complex images. Provide a concise description based on the image’s purpose and context. If the image is purely decorative,
mark it as “decorative” or use that as the alternative text. l Video Tutorial: Adding Alternative Text to Images (2:32) ● Good Alt Text, Bad Alt Text — Making Your Content Perceivable
#4: Use a Perceivable and Predictable Design Good design can make it easier for your readers to understand a document, helping them focus on the content’s meaning instead of how it looks. ● Use simple, sans-serif fonts like Arial. Avoid overly decorative fonts. ● Left-justify text to ensure consistent spacing between words, making it easier to read, especially for people with dyslexia or other reading difficulties. Fully justified text can create uneven spacing between words, disrupting the reading flow. ● Ensure sufficient contrast between the text and the background. To check contrast, use the WebAIM contrast checker or Accessible Web Color Contrast Checker. l Video Tutorial: Checking Color Contrast (2:16)
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#5: Check for Accessibility Use the built-in accessibility checker in your authoring tool to ensure your work meets basic accessibility requirements. l Video Tutorial: Using an Accessibility Checker (3:53) l Video Tutorial: Grackle Docs Demo - Accessibility Checker for Google Suite (21:43) Bonus Tip: Create Accessible PDFs In order to create an accessible PDF, start with an accessible source document and use the proper export method to ensure all accessibility features and structural elements from the original document are preserved in the PDF. Using incorrect methods, such as “Print to PDF,” can remove essential accessibility information, making the PDF unusable for individuals with disabilities. How to Convert Google Doc to PDF Create Accessible PDFs (Microsoft office)
This work, “Five Tips for Creating Accessible Documents”, is adapted from “Getting Started with Document Accessibility” by the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials (2020), used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license
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Extension Essentials is a curated series of resources and publications from the Extension Foundation, designed to empower and support Extension professionals in delivering impactful programs, advancing innovation, and fostering community engagement across diverse areas of expertise.
www.extension.org
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