Making electronic documents more accessible – without having to think too hard
Making a document available electronically is the first step to making it more accessible, largely due to all of the handy bits of technology that are available today, which put the control in the hands of the user … text to speech readers, zoom functions, ability to change the contrast of text and background colour … etc, etc. But there is much more that you can easily do when you are creating these documents to further improve their accessibility.
I have know the theory about making Word documents more accessible for several years now (thanks to JISC TechDis’ excellent Accessibility Essentials series) and I have applied a number of these theories for some time but in preparation for a session on making documents more accessible and also to test out the relatively new Accessibility Essentials for Office 2007, I have spent an hour or so going through ‘Writing Accessible Electronic Documents with Microsoft Word 2007‘ and having a go at creating a more accessible document … and it really is much less complicated than I thought it might be, especially as I have been changing my Word defaults as I go, so that from now on a lot of the accessibility features will automatically happen when I use Word.
Rather than repeat here what I did and how I did it I have provided links below to both the Word and pdf version of the (more accessible) document I created as I went along. I think that aside from reinforcing the things I knew, like using a sans serif font in a minimum size 12, making sure there was contrast between font and background, keeping underlining and using italic to a minimum, spacing the letters and lines appropriately and using meaningful images, the main thing I have learnt is that the structure of the document is key. I admit that I knew about this before but that I have always been wary of trying it out because I thought it was complicated and difficult … but today has proved to me that it isn’t … and that the benefits to the end user of having a more accessible, easier to navigate Word (and pdf) document far outweigh my initial reticence to have a go.
Have a look at the documents below and at the excellent Accessibility Essentials resources from JISC TechDis, than have a go yourself (if you aren’t already doing so, of course!).
Creating a more accessible Word document
Creating a more accessible pdf from a Word document
Tags: Accessibility, Accessibility Essentials, JISC TechDis, Office 2007, Word 2007
