Second Legislative Area or Policy or Standard

The University I work for is publicly funded and is subject to the 2018 accessibility regulations that require that all their digital content must be made “more accessible by making it ‘perceivable, operable, understandable and robust’.” (Gov.uk 2021) Specifically, all the digital content must meet the international WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard.

Description

In my previous position, organisation-wide PowerPoint and Word templates were distributed for use. However, they were not designed to be accessible - for example, the PowerPoint template used an image pasted onto a slide, with a textbox on top for the content. Our faculty asked for assistance in adapting it to be more accessible, and I worked with the designers, the office for inclusion, and a colleague who had who had extensive knowledge of accessibility issues, to produce Word and PowerPoint templates that met accessibility guidelines and the College branding requirements. Each template had two versions – a ‘Quick start’ and one with detailed instructions and explanation (see below). This was adapted for use in the Faculty, and later on distributed across the College for re-use by other Faculties.

As discussed in more detail in the Specialist Option section, in my current role I have been active in promoting the use of Blackboard Ally, by creating support resources and initiating participation in the ‘Fix Your Content Day’ event on the Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

Reflection

In recent years, providing accessible digital content has become a pressing need for publicly funded institutions, but there are still many gaps and improvements to be made. The solution has three elements: increasing awareness, motivating staff to make the requisite changes, and ensuring that they have the relevant skills. One way to improve awareness and motivation is to emphasise that designing for accessibility improves the experience for all users, in addition to enabling those with disabilities to fully participate in all activities – this can be helped through demonstrating good design in practice whenever possible. Empowering staff by making sure that they are aware of the inbuilt accessibility tools in Office365, Acrobat, and other software is important, as the goal is that all content is created to be fully accessible from the start and these tools have the advantage of being integrated into software that they are already familiar with. Providing training in-house, and also directing staff to self-learning resources such as the Microsoft Learn Accessibility fundamentals course is one way to achieve this.

Looking back at the documents I created in my previous role, I can see that the title pages for the Word documents are not designed in the best way, for example, using images to create borders. My ability to adapt them was limited by organisational decisions, and shows how making changes is a long term process and needs to be approached step-by-step - taking into account colleagues' priorities and institutional inertia. I also see that we recommended that PowerPoints and Word documents be converted to PDF format before sharing online. I would not recommend this now, as the Microsoft Immersive Reader provides a very good interface to assist reading and this works best with the original document. This demonstrates the need to keep abreast of changes, and build flexibility into solutions.

A solution has always seemed clear to me is to make sure that the default organisational template in Office365 is designed as a document with appropriate fonts and, for example, not using the default pale blue colour headings that come with Word which are not a good contrast. However, I have also learnt not to assume that making these changes is as easy as it seems and I will need to talk with relevant IT personnel to see if using an ‘Organisation Assets Library’ would be the right way to do this.

Accessible Templates Examples