Basic Digital Content Accessibility

This page offers a brief checklist of common digital accessibility considerations for documents, videos, and other content. It will be most useful to those who have already completed the Digital Content Accessibility Training on MyTrack and are looking for a brief reminder.

Each item below offers a description of the accessibility practice and a link to the Canvas Community version of the Digital Content Accessibility Training to learn more.

Quick Tips

Headings and Document/Page Structure

  • What to Do: Add descriptive headings to organize content using built-in Heading styles (most document editing software/systems have special "Heading" styles already in place)
  • Why: This will make it easier for people who are blind, who have low vision, who have reading or learning impairments, and/or who are neurodivergent to navigate and understand content
  • Tip: The visual appearance of properly formatted headings can be easily changed for an entire document at once, and text marked as a heading can be automatically turned into a table of contents in Word and other software
  • Learn more in the Headings & Document/Page Structure and module of the training, and in the Headings in Word supplementary module

Layout and Tables

  • What to Do: Use bullets and numbered list styles to organize lists of information, use columns and formatting for layout, and use tables for organizing data (not layout!)
  • Why: This will make it easier for people who are blind, who have low vision, who have reading or learning impairments, and/or who are neurodivergent to read and understand content
  • Tip: Use paragraph spacing and page breaks to spread out text, instead of adding blank lines
  • Learn more in the Tables & Layout module of the training, and in the Tables in Word and Formatting Text in Word supplementary modules

Fonts

  • What to Do: Use high-contrast colors, avoid typing in all capital letters, and text that's at least 11pt
  • Why: This will make text readable for people who have low vision, who are colorblind, who have reading or learning impairments, and/or who are neurodivergent
  • Tip: Use only dark text on light backgrounds and light text on dark backgrounds, and avoid putting text on top of multicolored backgrounds or images
  • Learn more in the Fonts: Type, Size, and Color module of the training

Links

  • What to Do: Provide appropriately descriptive text for all links
  • Why: This will make it easier for people who are blind, who have low vision, who have reading or learning impairments, and/or who are neurodivergent to understand where links go, and will prevent problems with assistive technologies that some people use
  • Tip: Link text should provide a clear indication of where it goes, and links that go to different pages need to have different link text
  • Learn more in the Hyperlinks module of the training, and in the Descriptive Hyperlinks in Word supplementary module

Images and Alternative Text

  • What to Do: Add appropriate alternative text to images, charts, and illustrations that convey meaningful information
  • Why: This will provide a description that can be used by people who are blind or who have low vision
  • Tip: Be very concise (does not need to be in complete sentences); consider the purpose of the image; do not include “image of” in text
  • Learn more in the Alt Text for Images module of the training, and in the Images & Alt Text in Word supplementary module

Video and Audio Captions

  • What to Do: Add accurate, complete captions to all videos
  • Why: This will provide an alternative to audio for people who are deaf and hard of hearing
  • Tip: Automatically generated captions contain mistakes that need to be corrected before a video is shared
  • Learn more Learn more in the Videos and Multimedia module of the training, and in the Creating Accessible Videos: Captioning supplementary module

Real Text

  • What to Do: Use real text instead of pictures of text (a scanned document or screenshot of text isn't real text)
  • Why: This allows people to change the format and size to meet their reading and visual needs, and will allow people who are blind to read it
  • Tip: Try to find the original digital version of a document, rather than scanning it and providing it as an image or PDF, and use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) when a scanned document is the only version available
  • Learn more in the Real Text module of the training

PDFs

  • What to Do: Tag content, set the reading order for each page, add alternative text for images, and perform OCR for scanned documents
  • Why: This will allow people with a variety of disabilities to be able to read and understand content
  • Tip: PDFs are very difficult to make accessible, and should be avoided in most circumstances; use Word documents, PowerPoint files, web pages, or other formats instead of PDFs, and if a PDF is needed, start from a Word or other document that you've already made accessible
  • Learn more in the Accessible PDF Resources section of the supplemental materials

Training Resources and Guides

The Digital Content Accessibility Training is on MyTrack, and modules can be easily revisited in the Canvas Community version. The Canvas Community version also contains supplemental materials, including platform-specific guides:

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