Creating Accessible Documents
I finished up WebAIM's course on creating accessible documents using Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Acrobat, and I would highly recommend it to anyone responsible for creating learning documents to be shared with students, colleagues, or the public in general.
Before the course, my understanding of creating accessible documents in the various Microsoft programs was largely limited to color contrast, providing captions for images and videos, and utilizing the reading order in PowerPoint. And Adobe Acrobat Pro? I knew close to nothing.
This course taught me how to create accessible document structures in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel; evaluate the accessibility of Word and PowerPoint files; and optimize exported PDFs with Adobe Acrobat.
While a lot of the content was specific to these programs, the introductory module also discussed how to optimize writing for all learners and properly use hyperlinks in a way that is screen-reader-friendly. Having videos that showed what screenreader users experienced was informative and reinforced the importance of utilizing the described best practices to review document accessibility.
I feel much more confident in my ability to create accessible learning documents for my job because of this course. If you want to learn more about this course, and the scholarship program they offer, or download the NVDA screenreader, check out the related links section at the bottom of this post.
