Accessible documents
As much as possible, the ultimate goal is ease of access to information. Most documents can be made at least minimally accessible with the techniques listed below. In general :
- Even in basic text form (without headings and tagging) Word documents are more accessible than pdfs.
- PDFs that display text as an image are completely inaccessible to anyone with a print disability. (See "Create PDFs" below.)
Create Word documents using these simple steps:
- Organize your information in logical fashion so that readers can follow it.
- Structure the text with heading styles and lists.
- Provide alternative presentations for potentially inaccessible items such as images (alt tags), complex tables and media with sound (captions).
- Add a Table of Content to long documents.
- Double-check what you've done against:
- known experts in the field or organizational experts (usually someone with a disability is the best option)
- standards, best practices and automated checkers
- Invite comments and criticisms and be willing to modify what you've done.
Create PDFs with one of these processes:
(Preferred) Word documents saved directly to PDF format create the most accessible documents especially if the Word document had appropriate headings and tagged images. Saving a document in PDF format is different than printing it as a PDF document. The latter produces an image rather than a text-based document.
Documents that exist only in a physical printed form need to scanned with an OCR (optional character reading) scanner. An OCR scanner creates text rather than an inaccessible image. However, there are other considerations to keep in mind when creating pdfs through scanning. Scanning should always be done with as clean a copy of the original document as possible. The following contribute to poor quality PDFs:
- underlining,
- notes in the margins,
- highlighting, and
- smudged or fuzzy text.
As with all other document creation, a final proofread will catch errors in optical character reading text conversions.