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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Five Tips for Creating Easy-to-Access Documents Creating accessible documents ensures all users, including people with disabilities, can access and understand your content. This handout covers five essential tips for inclusive document creation, plus bonus guidance on creating accessible PDFs. #1: Use Heading Styles 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. Making text big and bold is not the same as applying a heading style; assistive technologies won’t recognize it as document structure. Always apply heading levels from the Styles menu.
Creating accessible documents ensures all users, including those with disabilities, can easily access and understand your content.
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 read alt text aloud to describe images for users who are blind or have low vision. Write a concise description based on what the image communicates, not just what it depicts. If the image is purely decorative, use the ‘Mark as decorative’ checkbox in your authoring tool. l Video Tutorial: Adding Alternative Text to Images (2:32) ● WebAIM Tutorial: Alternative Text (Includes guidance for complex images) ● 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. ● Choose fonts that make individual letters easy to tell apart. Clean, simple fonts like Verdana or Arial are good options. 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 To create an accessible PDF, start with an accessible source document and use the correct export method to preserve all accessibility features and structural elements. Methods like ‘Print to PDF’ strip essential accessibility information, making the PDF difficult or impossible to use with assistive technology. ● How to Save a Google Doc as a PDF ● Create Accessible PDFs (Microsoft Office)
● Create and Verify PDF Accessibility (Acrobat Pro) ● Adobe Acrobat Tutorials: Accessibility Series
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 publica - tions 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.
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Curator/editor: Lisa Linfield
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