Document design
When we think about accessible design, we often first think about designing for people who use specific adaptive technologies like screen readers, or designing to ensure we tick all the boxes on an “accessibility checklist.” It’s important to meet those standards, but accessible design practices support a wide variety of users, including people with auditory or visual processing issues, attention, learning, or cognitive issues, colorblindness, and more. Accessible design also helps us create content that is thoughtfully organized and pleasant to use. Following these tips can help your audience productively engage with your content – and even enjoy it!
Accessible layouts
- Allow users to select text, zoom, change font and colour
- Include alt text and/or descriptive image captions
- Meet colour contrast standards
- Minimize “visual clutter”
- Avoid the use of tables, where possible
- Avoid the use of pop-ups and new tabs, where possible
- Avoid the use of auto-play media and flashing/moving graphics
- Use a consistent style from page to page and section to section, incorporating tags and/or headings where appropriate
Microsoft Outlook
Not all students use their UBC email for correspondence, but these tips on how to write accessible emails in Outlook will still be helpful!
Lecture decks
By following these accessibility suggestions, you make it easier for students to engage with your slides during your lecture, and you also make it easier for students to access your slides for review. Porting lecture slides to different formats or saving in different file formats can change your layout, and sometimes information becomes less accessible as a result – or worse, is omitted completely!
If you plan to provide your slides to students, you may want to offer the files in a few different formats, if feasible. Instructors often provide slides in PDF as a default – if you choose this option, make sure your PDF is accessible (with selectable text) and not saved as an image-only PDF. Also make sure that the layout of your original document “works” as a PDF – slides with animations or multiple images may not render properly.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint offers pre-set templates designed with accessibility in mind.
If you change any of your template’s pre-selected settings, accessibility may be affected, so it’s still a good idea to run the Accessibility Checker, just in case! Also bear in mind that content you add to slides, like images or tables, may not be accessible and may require further editing.
Keynote
Keynote doesn’t offer accessible templates, but Keynote does support accessibility features like image description.
Google Slides
Google Slides also offers support using accessibility features like image description and slide captioning.
PDFs
If you’d like to offer content in PDF, you can make it more accessible by using the tools built into PDF creation software like Adobe Acrobat. A guide for accessibility in Acrobat is also available.
Free tools like Adobe Reader don’t allow editing, but UBC faculty and staff can freely access licenses to use Adobe products through UBC IT.
We often think of PDF as a default format. It’s not necessarily the most accessible format, however. PDFs were developed to provide content in a fixed layout format. Spacing, font, text, and images stay consistent, regardless of the application or operating system being used by the viewer. This fixed quality means PDFs work well for printing, and other applications where you don’t want the layout or formatting to be changed. PDFs are also sometimes considered more “secure,” because they can locked, preventing any editing; they can also be watermarked and password-protected. These features can be useful for legal documents, but they are not very user-friendly for students. These features also make it difficult for users to adapt the layout to their needs and preferences.
HTML and EPUB are more accessible options, because they provide content in a reflowable format, rather than a fixed format. Readers can select the layout that best suits their needs, and will be able to access your content on a variety of devices. PDFs be difficult to read on phones and tablets, or on devices that have smaller screens – users often have to scroll or zoom in and out while reading.
PressBooks
PressBooks is an open platform with many accessibility-friendly features. It’s a great option for textbooks and other course materials. Learn about the accessibility support PressBooks provides.