Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and as Global Accessibility Awareness Day draws to a close, we will leave you, with our:

Design Considerations

Document accessibility involves a number of different factors. Choices made to improve the visual appearance of a project may hinder or enhance readability for all users. Furthermore, access to documents encompasses word choice and sentence structure. Finally, it comes down to checking your work to ensure that the document you have created is meeting the needs it was created to fulfill. The below guidelines are a sample of the types of things that should be considered when creating a document, that were not covered in other sections of this article.

• The appropriate use of whitespace will make your project easier to understand and clearer for all users.  Blind users will not notice this so much, but elderly, low vision, and users with cognitive or motor control issues will benefit greatly from a document that is neither overly busy nor overly sparse.  All users will find such a document or site easier to navigate and more pleasant to use. When considering whitespace issues, be sure to consider the fonts you are using and ensure that they are easily read, and not too thin to provide good contrast.
• Similarly, make sure that your document offers strong contrast to aid users with low vision, or those using small screen devices.
• Check that your document can easily scale in size as this will make it easier to view for many users.
• When writing content, avoid writing poor link text like “click here” in order to increase the readability of your document for all users.

Finally, and most importantly, when creating documents and websites, particularly of a complex nature, it is critical to work with blind users, and other users with disabilities to ensure that the document has been created accessibly.  User testing is the only sure way to verify that your message is able to actually reach its intended audience.   

A Fond Farewell

These blog posts only scratch the surface of what it means to make documents accessible, but, they also build a solid framework for continuing to learn about making documents accessible to all users.  They cover some of the most common, and often most limiting errors made by document creators, so adhering only to the principles outlined here will get most documents into a usable, if not near ideal state for the majority of users. For further reading, and specific tips on how to make Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and other documents accessible, as well as links to a host of other resources, you can review the original article, “Creating Nonvisually Accessible Documents” which will be posted here shortly.