Accessibility for Old and New Documents

The reason for ensuring documents are accessible is that people who rely on screen readers need to be able to access the same content as someone who does not use a screen reader. When a screen reader reads a PowerPoint slide, for example, it needs to read the content in the order intended by the author. A screen reader also is able to identify images and hyperlinks, but without alternative or descriptive text, it is impossible for the screen reader user to understand the content effectively.

The Department of Health and Human Services provides 508 Compliance Checklists for documents. It is important to use these checklists when assessing the accessibility of your documents.

In this section, we will consider two types of documents: newly created documents and old documents needing remediation.

Newly Created Documents

The best practices for creating new documents:

• Follow the guidelines from the 508 checklists.
• Use the built-in templates available in Microsoft Office Products, Google Docs, or whatever software you are using
• Check the reading order, especially for pages with multiple elements (text, figures, images, graphs, etc.). See sections on specific document types for instructions on how to set reading order.
• Understand the difference between background images (okay for a screen reader to ignore) and an image that conveys meaning important to understanding the content, in which case, use alternative text ("Alt Text").
• Use the built-in table tool when creating tables for your document (i.e., don't copy/past from Excel).
• Use the Accessibility checker available in most products (N.B. the accessibility checker will find most common issues, but will not make your document 508 compliant. Use the checklists!). If the document you created was not using Microsoft Office products and does not have its own accessibility checker, you will need to convert it to an MS Office document to check.

Why Using Templates is Important

Using templates will significantly reduce the amount of details that you have to fix later after running the accessibility checker. Screen readers will not recognize Titles and Headings just by size and font; instead use the built-in styles, which tag the headings appropriately in a way screen readers can interpret. For example, when creating this document in Word, this section, “Accessibility for Documents,” was given a Heading 1 attribute and “Newly Created Documents” a Heading 2 attribute. The various headings are located under the Style section in the menu. Later, if you choose to convert your document to a PDF, all of the built-in heading information will be preserved, and your PDF document will need much less remediation. Imagine you are reading a journal article and all you want to read is the abstract and the methods section. If the document is properly tagged, a screen reader user will be able to jump from section to section by tabbing through the various sections until they get to the section they want. Without the heading tags, they would have to go through the entire document with no clues as to which section they are in.

Old Documents Needing Remediation

Older versions of Office documents did not have built in accessibility features. Even if you save the document in the latest version, some legacy background code may make it difficult for a screen reader to read. Do you have a Word or PowerPoint document made using Office 97 that you pull up every year to make necessary updates and save it as the new version of Word or PowerPoint? It may be time to recreate the document from scratch using the best practices for newly created documents.

Old PDFs are difficult to make accessible. If you no longer have the source document, it may be a good idea to recreate it.