Creating Accessible Documents

In Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug notes that making digital information accessible to everyone is “not just the right thing to do; it’s profoundly the right thing to do.”

Why?
“Because,” Krug says, “the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?”

One way to do your job a little better is to create accessible documents, so that students won’t encounter unnecessary challenges while using those documents. The strategies below can apply to printed documents, but they’re especially important for digital text.

Three Ways to Get Started
Use your software’s formatting tools—especially styles—to create headings and subheadings. Text- editing programs such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs use styles to apply predetermined formatting to text, creating titles, subheads, bulleted lists, numbered lists, and more. When you use styles instead of manually formatting text, you make the text readable to text-to-speech software, including screen readers used by the blind and other students with disabilities.

Make sure that the document text is “live,” not an image. Can you highlight text in your document, copy it, and paste it elsewhere? If so, it’s probably “live” text that can be read by text-to-speech software. If the text can’t be copied and pasted, it’s probably an image.

Use high-contrast text, and use color sparingly. People with low vision or color blindness have difficulty reading small or low-contrast text. Avoid opposite color combinations (e.g., red text on a green background). Such combinations may be difficult for colorblind users to perceive; they may trigger migraines in other readers.

Resources
For more information about accessible documents, visit “Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning at Boise State.”
Submitted by:
Kevin S. Wilson
Instructional Design Consultant
Instructional Design and Educational Assessment (IDEA Shop) Center for Teaching and Learning
Boise State University

More tips and just-in-time resources are available at https://conhi.asu.edu/academic-innovation