Document Accessibility
Document accessibility is the process of making online documents (Word, Presentations, Excel, PDFs, etc.) available and readable to everyone.
Please review the guidelines below and integrate them in your day-to-day workflow.
Who is responsible?
Anyone who creates documents (word, presentations, pdfs, etc.) is responsible for checking and confirming that the document is WCAG 2.1 AA compliant.
Tools for Accessibility
Microsoft Accessibility Checkers and Adobe Acrobat PDF Checkers
Document Best Practices
General Document Guidelines
Many of the most important guidelines like structure, alt text, style, formatting and content can be found within the Digital Accessibility Basics page. As the basics become a part of your every day routine, document accessibility will become second nature. Learn more about document types and their specific guidelines and tools below.
Microsoft Products
These include Word documents Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints, etc.
All Microsoft products have a "Check Accessibility" button built into them that makes simple changes easy to catch and fix. The button can typically be found under the "Review" tab.
There are some guidelines it will not catch like:
Hyperlinks: Use the title of the website rather than the URL in documents.
Navigation: Manually check with your tab key that a user can get anywhere within the document without using a mouse.
Lists: Be sure to use the bullet point, number or letter functions instead of manually adding them to a document.
PDFs
While PDFs are a commonly used document type, they are not always the most accessible option and require a decent bit of knowledge to make them accessible. In some cases, it may be easier to share a read only version of a document rather than downloading it as a PDF and going through the accessibility steps on this page. Learn more about read only documents on the Microsoft Support Read Only in Word webpage.
Below are guidelines to follow when creating a PDF:
Follow the Digital Accessibility Basics when creating the original document and many of the issues that may be flagged will already be compliant.
Check the original document (before saving as a PDF) for accessibility using the built in Microsoft Accessibility Checkers. Remediate all flagged issues.
Export the PDF using Microsoft's instructions to save an accessible PDF. This will ensure all items you've changed will be preserved in the accessible PDF.
After the export, it is beneficial to run an Accessibility Check in Adobe Acrobat Pro to ensure all issues are resolved and the document is fully compliant.
Below are guidelines to follow when checking an existing PDF:
Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Be sure to use the desktop version and not the browser version as this won't have the accessibility check feature.
All MCC employees have access to Adobe Acrobat Pro through their MyApps page. Select Adobe Creative Cloud and login using your MCC credentials. Once you've logged in, download Adobe Acrobat Pro to your desktop.
In the menu on the left side, select "Prepare for accessibility"
You may have to click "view more" before the accessibility checker appears to you.
In the menu on the left side, select "Check for accessibility"
There will be several boxes pre-checked. Leave them as is and then select "Start Checking"
All of the flagged issues will appear in a bar on the right side. Right click to fix the issues, skip them, or learn more about how to resolve them.
If the PDF has been scanned in, far more issues will appear than a document that has been saved from Word or another text format and checked for accessibility before.
Some of the most important items to resolve are missing alt text, making sure the document is tagged appropriately,
For more information about the types of errors that will appear and how to resolve them, visit Adobe's Guide to Creating Accessible PDFs.
Other tools and tutorials for making PDFs accessible: