5 Easy Steps to an Accessible Syllabus

Text is the most commonly used format for presenting or sharing information. Luckily, it’s also the most accessible format, if it’s formatted correctly. Let's look at the top 5 steps you can take to create an accessible Word document.

Step 1: Use Headings

Sighted viewers can scan a page and use visual cues like larger or bolded text to find the section of a document that they want to read. For someone using a screen reader, these visual markups are useless - leaving them to navigate word by word from the start of the document or webpage until they find the section they want.

Using headings and styles will allow a screen reader to navigate from section to section, making for a more convenient experience for the user.

Step 2: Add Alternative Text to Graphics

Alternative text, also called alt-text, is text associated with an image or other graphic that someone unable to see the image understands what the image conveys. Alt-text should be under 100 characters and provide a short and sweet description of the image given the context in which it is presented. If the image is purely decorative and you want a screen reader to skip over it, be sure to check to make sure the file name is not listed as default alt-text. Press the spacebar and then enter to indicate the image is decorative.

Step 3: Use Descriptive Hyperlinks

When you want to include a URL in your document, you want to use descriptive hyperlinks. That involves embedding the URL into text. For someone using a screen reader this is helpful by telling them where the link will take them and avoid having to listen to a screen reader read the full URL.

Step 4: Use the Built-In Styling/Formatting Tools

Use bulleted or numbered lists by using Word's formatting tools (not by typing the numbers or dashes yourself). Using the list formatting tool allows a screen reader to determine the length of the list and the reader can understand how the content is organized and how many items are on the list. When you click on what appears to be a list, the list icon will be selected. If it’s not, then the “list” has not been formatted as a list. Many people use the tab key to create columns of text. Since a screen reader is going to read left to right, using tab to create columns will result in the screen reader reading by line, not column. Use page breaks, line spacing, and the increase/decrease indent keys to create formatting rules.

Step 5: Table Properties

Per Universal Design and Accessibility standards, tables should only be used to convey data, never to control the layout of a document. Screen readers will read a table from left to right starting at the top. The relationship between the cells is not defined by a screen reader if it is not formatted correctly, meaning that the category that a piece of data falls into will not be identified by the screen reader. Add a Title and Description to the table properties and under the Design tab, make sure the Headers and Rows checkboxes are checked too. 

When you have made formatting changes following steps 1-5, you can use the Microsoft accessibility checker to check for accessibility issues in your document. You can go to file, then select “check for Issues” in order to get to the accessibility checker. Not only will it point out errors, but it will guide you on how to fix them.

Resources

For guidance on how to use these formatting elements, review the Accessible Syllabus Workshop video below:

Accessible PowerPoints

The fortunate thing about building accessible content is that the strategies you use to create accessible Word documents are the same for PowerPoints, webpages, and other documents and online spaces. The biggest difference with PowerPoints, because they are so heavily focused on the design of the slide, is that the use of a Template slide is highly recommended. Template slides have built in screen-reader functionality to deliver the slide content to the "viewer" in the correct order (referred to as Reading Order). Making changes to template slides may disrupt the accessibility settings built-in to the slide design, so if you make changes, be sure to use the Microsoft accessibility checker to verify the accessibility of that slide.

The following resources offer additional PowerPoint accessibility support:

• Microsoft: Make Your PowerPoint Presentations Accessible

• Microsoft: Accessibility Support for PowerPoint

• WebAIM: PowerPoint Accessibility

External Resources

The Microsoft Office website offers additional support for making Word documents accessible, if you will find additional instructions useful.

Adobe offers a guide on checking accessibility in Adobe PDFs. However, if you are using a different PDF tool, they may have different accessibility options.

For more practice with creating accessible documents, ID&D also recommends complete the Creating Accessible Documents in Microsoft Office training on LinkedIn Learning (available through GullNet) where you can follow along with a document that Glenna Shaw provides you to practice with.

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