Accessible Document Creation

Overview

Ensure that documents and presentations you create are accessible to everyone in your intended audience, including people with disabilities.

Best Practices for Documents

• Avoid visual clutter (e.g. use San serif fonts (for digital viewing), don’t have too many things on the page)
• Use headers and styles where appropriate.
• Use proper color contrast.
• Write alt text for all non-decorative photos, diagrams and videos.
• Use meaningful hyperlink text Good example: check out this class’s syllabus; Bad examples: check out this class’s syllabus here; check out this class’s syllabus: /courses/cse513/25au
• Properly mark up tables
• Screen reader order is correct (in documents where it applies, such as PowerPoint)
• Slides have room for captions
• Videos on slides are captioned
• Font sizes are large enough (above 20 ideally for slides; above 11 for documents)

Guidance these best practices is available for major platforms including Microsoft Products and Google Products. In this class, we are asking you to use Microsoft products because they have a built in automated accessibility checker. You can get Microsoft 365 through UW IT.

Typical Handin for this Competency

• Your writeup (Microsoft word) or PowerPoint
• A list of images and the ALT text you wrote for each of them
• Which best practices are demonstrated in this document or PowerPoint
• A screen shot showing the accessibility checker results for your document or PowerPoint