Creating Accessible Documents
Instructions for creating accessible documents in different programs.
Consider our "Fast Five" essentials for preparing materials for your courses:
- In-program styles
- Convey meaning with words
- In-program accessibility checkers
- Captioning
- Setting a language
Microsoft Documents
- Make your Excel documents accessible to people with disabilities
- Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities
- Make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities
- Using Word's Style Gallery to Create Structure in Your Document
- Creating PDFs
Instructions for the Microsoft Office Suite
For Microsoft Office Suite documents such as those created with Word, Powerpoint, or Excel, we highly recommend the LinkedIn Learning course, Digital Accessibility for the Modern Workplace.
All Office Suite documents have an Accessibility Checker built-in. Go to the Review menu and select Check Accessibility.
Google Workspace
- Use the Grackle plugin as the in-program accessibility checker for Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets.
- Creating PDFs
Chrome can get confused when there is more than one user logged in to a browser, and it causes add-ons to hang. Visit Grackle not responding for possible solutions.
The most accessible option is to export the document into Microsoft Word first, and then follow those steps to make your PDF accessible. However, you can make your Google Doc more accessible by using Grackle. Grackle is a plugin that acts as an accessibility checker.
Apple
Headings in Pages
- Type the text you want into Pages.
- Select a sentence/phrase that you want to become a heading.
- Select Format.
- Select the heading you want, such as the Heading 1 button.
See also: Intro to paragraph styles in Pages | Mac help.
PDFs
For accessibility help with PDFs, see the articles Make PDFs Accessible to More Students (Fundamentals) or Accessible Alternatives to PDF.