It’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day! This means it is time to celebrate accessibility. All over the world today, people with disabilities and their allies including disability rights advocates, web accessibility specialists, teachers, corporations, and all sorts of others are discussing the importance of ensuring that websites, storefronts, education, travel, books, and all manner of content and public spaces are available and accessible to the widest selection of the population. The other topic up for discussion discussion is how we can share the importance of this message with those who don’t yet know how important and how easy it can be to make the world more accessible for everyone. In recognition of this event, the members of the Access Technology Team at the National Federation of the Blind are offering a number of mini-articles on the topic of making documents accessible to blind users. If you wish to read more, these articles are based upon the document “Creating Nonvisually Accessible Documents,” which will be made available in its entirety at the end of the day. Without further ado, let’s discuss a few of the …
 

Accessibility FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

How hard is it to make documents accessible? How long will it take? Is it expensive?

We’ve grouped these three questions together because they come down to one simple question: is creating accessible documents going to require extraordinary effort? This will depend on context. If you have a simple project, or if you are just starting a project, and can plan it with accessibility in mind, it will not take much, if any, additional effort to add the features required to make it accessible. If however, your project is complex and already completed without considering accessibility, then making it accessible will likely involve spending some time (and sometimes money) on remediation.  Even with these complex projects, remediating to add accessibility and ensuring that new features are implemented accessibly will add value to your project far beyond the benefit of ensuring that blind users and others with disabilities are able to use it, as detailed below.

Will it make my project visually unappealing?

No. If a document is created accessibly, it can be styled very effectively without affecting the underlying information. In fact, many of the tools that allow for the creation of accessible documents can make the process of visually styling a document easier.  For instance, a Word user can set up the heading structure of their document once, and then change visual design used with very little effort as all changes will propagate through the pre-styled elements.

Will my project be less functional if it is created to be accessible?

No. On the contrary, many of the tools used to make documents accessible will also make them more useful. For example, Word can automatically generate a table of contents from headings placed in the text.

Is it really worth the effort?

Consider the following:

• Accessible documents are useful to more than just blind users. Most of the features added to increase accessibility also make projects easier to use for a wide variety of people
  • Keyboard users
  • Those with small screen devices
  • Dictation software users
  • People using automated tools to gather information on documents, webpages, and other media
• Some accessibility features can make a project easier to migrate to other platforms or formats.
• In many cases accessibility is required by law
• It simplifies and improves interactions with blind customers, employees and employers