Preparing Accessible Documents for your eLearning Course
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According to the WHO, there are 259 million visually impaired people worldwide, and the CDC estimates that 3 in 100 Americans have a visual impairment. It is very, very likely that online courses will have visually impaired students, so it’s important to make sure that all course content is accessible to the visually impaired. One way to ensure that all students have equal access to course materials is through the creation of accessible documents, particularly MS Office and Adobe .pdf documents.
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An accessible document is a document that a visually impaired person with a screen reader can read as easily as a fully sighted person can. As is true with most other things in instructional design, the best time to make a document accessible is to build in accessibility as you’re creating it. Ensuring that your course documents are fully accessible doesn’t have to be a chore if you can remember to check the following:
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Add alt-text to all visual images. In addition to pictures, you should add alt-text to illustrations, charts, tables, shapes, embedded objects, signatures, and media files. Also, make sure that the images you include do not have watermarks, because a screen reader watermarks trip up the screen reader.
Use preset styles in long documents. MS Office includes built-in style menus, and you should use them when creating the title, headings, and subheadings in your document. Make sure to use heading styles in numerical order, and remember to only use numbers or round bullet points for your lists. Using these style tips in your document will ensure that screen readers can actually read it.
Format tables carefully. Keep table formatting as simple as possible. Make sure to specify column header rows in tables. Don’t merge cells, and avoid leaving blank cells as a spacing method in your document, because both of these confuse screen readers. Instead, use cell padding and spacing to format space in the table, and use line and paragraph spacing to format the rest of the document.
Check your work. Many Learning Management Systems--including Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas have built-in accessibility checkers to help guide and troubleshoot your accessibility efforts. The Microsoft Office Suite and Google GSuite and Adobe Acrobat Pro all have built-in accessibility checkers. If you aren’t sure whether or not authoring tools you use have built-in accessibility features, then it’s a good idea to search for that product’s Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT™). This will tell you everything about the accessibility features for any given product.
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Format your hyperlinks correctly. All of the hyperlinks should be provided within a sentence to give context for the linked information and facilitate readability. The hyperlinked sentence structure should specifically refer to the site that the link leads to.
Good structure:
To view ADA regulations visit https://www.ada.gov
Bad Structure:
To view ADA regulations can be found here: https://www.ada.gov/
To view ADA regulations click here.
If you need broader guidance on how to create and check accessibility in your course materials, you can download the Accessibility checklist from Section508.gov, or consult their online style guides for creating accessible digital products with several common applications.
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