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

Apple

Headings in Pages

1. Type the text you want into Pages.
2. Select a sentence/phrase that you want to become a heading.
3. Select Format. 
4. 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.

Additional Resources

• Principles of Accessible Design
• Best Practices: Webpage Creation