Make accessibility a habit: Word Documents

Making your documents more accessible is not just about running them through accessibility checkers, it’s about making it a habit.

If you only run your documents through an accessibility checker, then you are only doing half the job. You need to write and design for everyone, including the layout and format choices of your Word documents.

Here are 10 good practices to get in the habit of:

1. Use built in styles in Word for titles, headings and subheadings, bullets, and numbers.
2. Use headings Title, H1, H2, H3 to create the document’s structure in a hierarchy.
3. Use a sans serif font such as Arial, Calibri, or Helvetica. 
4. Use a font size 12 point or larger.
5. Use bold for emphasis, but use it sparingly.
6. Chose a good contrast between foreground and background colours. Avoid red on green or green on red.
7. Use short sentences and clear language.
8. Align text to the left.
9. Use alt text for images and describe the image in the context of the document. If the image is purely decorative add empty alt text, like this “ ”, or use the ‘mark as decorative’ option when available.
10. When you create hyperlinks, make the Text to Display meaningful, unique and descriptive. Write the URL only if the document needs to be printed.

And three things to avoid.

• Avoid columns of text. Two columns are ok if you use the column feature in Word and include a title row above the columns.
• Avoid italics and underline text as these are hard to read or can be confused for links. 
• Avoid the use of text boxes or text over an image, as screen readers can’t read them. 

These guidelines are not just for text readers, they’re for everyone. These tips also help with cognitive memory, and help to not visually overload learners. Read more in this excellent paper by Domenico Mazza from Monash University – Reducing Cognitive Load and Supporting Memory in Visual Design for HCI.

Apply these design principles to your text editor in Moodle and e-mails to students. Make it a habit.

Always run your documents through accessibility checker in Word. This is easy to do and only takes a minute. Just click the ‘Review’ tab in the ribbon to see the accessibility checker tool.

Finally, when you upload your documents to Moodle, use Ally for a final check.

• Use Blackboard Ally on Moodle to improve document accessibility (Canvas)

If you save a word document as a PDF before uploading to Moodle there are a few extra steps to save your accessibility settings and get a 100% accessibility score on Ally. You will need to have Adobe Acrobat on your device.

Here is how to make the changes to the title on PDFs.

• Improving PDF accessibility of word documents. (4m 26 secs)
• Make Accessibility a Habit – PDFs

If you need any further help or want to organise a group training session, please contact the Digital Learning team at lccdigitallearning@lcc.arts.ac.uk.

Further resources:

• Make Things Accessible – a repository for accessibility guidance materials
• AT Hive – explore assistive technology (AT) and how it can help
• My Computer My Way – for advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability