Accessible digital content

Making content accessible

When sharing content, it is important to follow a few basic steps to assure it is readable and usable by everyone, including persons with disabilities. This page will cover digital documents, PDF remediation options and who to contact for website accessibility support. Accessible and inclusive teaching information is available on the Accessible Canvas and Accessibility tips for teaching resource pages.

Digital document basics

Some of the most common electronic document file types are Microsoft Word documents (.docx), PowerPoint slides (.pptx), Excel spreadsheets (.xlsx), Outlook emails (.eml), Google Docs/sheets/slides and PDFs.

The following content will guide through some basics in document accessibility:

• Making documents accessible
• Accessibility quick reference
  • Word
  • PowerPoint
  • Excel
  • Outlook

For additional information, access UW Digital Accessibility > Accessibility Basics.

PDFs

Many of us developed a habit of saving files as a PDF to protect our documents, but PDFs are now easy to edit by anyone. In general, PDFs are the least accessible type of document and require additional work to fix accessibility issues. We can certainly reduce our use of PDFs, but those cases where PDFs are still necessary, there are some options to make PDFs accessible. UW has provided some guidance and resources:

• Accessibility and PDFs: Role-based Decision Trees
• PDFs from Microsoft Word
• PDFs from PowerPoint
• PDFs from InDesign
• Checking PDFs for accessibility
• Making math content accessible

Google Apps

Google Docs, Slides and Sheets are other widely used applications to produce digital documents. Although these apps are easy to use and share, they do not offer the accessibility robustness that Microsoft apps have. Two of these areas are the lack of an accessibility checker and the inability to mark images as decorative.

The Accessible Documents (Part 1) and Accessible Documents (Part 2: Presentations) recorded webinars led by Gaby de Jongh, Document Accessibility Specialist and Manager of the UW Access Technology Center, provide easy to follow directions and information on creating accessible documents using Word and Google Docs as well as accessible slides using PowerPoint and Google Slides.