Creating accessible documents is crucial for ensuring all students can effectively engage with course materials. This includes students who are blind or low vision, use a keyboard to navigate, use screen readers, Braille displays, or other assistive technology. Documents like Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel can be made accessible by applying the following basic design principles.
Headings provide important organizational and navigational support for all learners. If you've ever created a topic outline, you'll have no problem understanding how headings work. There are six heading levels. Heading 1 always serves as the title, and there should be only one heading 1 per document. Heading 2 is used for all subtopics, heading 3 sub-subtopics, and so on. Properly nested headings are especially important for those who use assistive technologies like screen readers and other text-to-speech applications. While sighted learners typically skim a page by looking at different font sizes and their relationships on the page, blind and low vision students will often skim the page by using their screen reader to pull up a list of its headings to give them an idea of how the content is organized. What's more, they can use that same heading list to quickly navigate to any section (heading) of the page content (like the Grading section of your syllabus, for example).
Properly formatted numbered and bulleted lists can help organize related items and allow for assistive technology to detect and inform users about the presence of a list, how many items are in the list, and the list structure for easy navigation.
Lists should be only be employed when the content presents a logical list. Do not use list structure for elements that do not form a logical list. Use unordered lists (bullet points) for content that does not have a obvious, logical order and save ordered (numbered) lists for content where there are clear logical steps to the list order.
Links and their destination should make sense out of context. "Click here" or "more" do not convey enough information about where the link leads. Use link text that can be intuitively understood regardless of order and the context around the link. Keep link text concise and direct. For example, link text should not include the word "link", that information has already been conveyed by the presence of a link on the page.
In order to provide equal access, alternative text needs to convey all the relevant context and content that a sighted user would gain from the image. When writing alternate text, ask yourself "What information (that is necessary to the content of the page) does this image convey?" Keep any alt text as short and concise as possible. When the image does not convey useful information, mark the image as decorative.
Tables are used to convey tabular information in a grid. Given this, tables should only be used to present tabular data and not used for design or other purposes. Make sure the headers for row and columns are clearly marked. We recommend keeping the table structure as simple as possible and avoiding tables with multiple levels of headers or headers that are spanned across multiple cells. Some screen readers struggle to support more complex table structures.