AHEAD: Association for Higher Education Access & Disability
Creating inclusive environments in education & employment for people with disabilities.

Menu

Creating Accessible Documents

Making electronic documents that you produce accessible is both the easiest and most effective way to increase ease of access to lecture notes, guidelines and any other written material you produce for students. Once you get into the habit of this, it is actually of great benefit to the creators of documents as it allows for very quick reformatting on large documents, the easy creation of clickable tables of contents and quick navigation of large documents.

The key is to get into the mindset of adding the accessibility features at the creation stage.

Making Word Documents Accessible

Key Points:

  • NB: Use styles to structure your document in a hierarchical manner. Titles should be formatted with ‘Title’ style, main section names with the ‘Heading 1’ style, sub section names with the ‘Heading 2’ style etc. All body text should be formatted in the ‘Normal’ style. This allows for easy navigation of large documents through the document map and allows those using screen reading software to skip through sections easily.
  • Use a Sans Serif font (such as Arial/Verdana) at a size no less than 12pt.
  • When using images ensure you have described them for the visually impaired using ‘Alt Text’
  • This webinar recording has more information about making your Word Documents accessible.

Making PDFs Accessible

Get the full low down on making your pdfs accessible here.

Making Powerpoint Presentations Accessible

View this webinar recording to find out more about accessible presentations.

Making your Webpage more accessible

Guidelines for making your webpage accessible can be found here.

© AHEAD
Creating Inclusive Environments in Education and Employment for People with Disabilities

East Hall, UCD, Carysfort Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin.
T +353 1 592 1467 E ahead@ahead.ie W www.ahead.ie RCN 20025182