Making Your Policies Accessible to All Audiences

Most institutions are now aware of the need for recognizing and respecting the differences among the members of our stakeholder communities. As policy administrators, many of us are building equity review into our policy development processes.

Most of us now publish our institutions' policies online and share our policy drafts electronically, rather than in paper policy manuals or through paper documents. Just as it's important to consider adding equity review to the development of policies, it's also important that we consider how to prepare the content for distribution in ways that make it accessible to a wide range of people, including those who use assistive devices.

Here are some considerations for your institutions, all of which we’ve put in place here at Washington State University (WSU):

• Establish a policy and/or procedures for improving the accessibility of online and electronic content. As an example, here at WSU we have an executive policy and supporting procedures:
  • University Web Accessibility Policy
  • Ensuring Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility
• Require web accessibility training for all institutional online developers and webmasters.
• Provide issue reporting and complaint/grievance procedures regarding accessibility issues.

At WSU, our Web Communications unit handles web accessibility problems and our institution's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) coordinator is responsible for managing access complaints and grievances.

Creating Accessible Word and PDF Documents

Most of us use Word to create our source documents and either Word or PDF for drafts and creating web versions of our policies. Taking in consideration of assistive devices, here's some key components for making Word and PDF documents accessible to all:

• Headings:
  • Headings create a hierarchy in the document that a screen reader can follow.
• Document Title, Description, and Tags:
  • A default document title is necessary for a screen reader to be able to scan and read out loud to its user.
  • A document description gives screen reader users a brief summary of the document they are about to read.
  • Document tags allow a screen reader to know if they are looking at an image, a paragraph, a heading, etc.
• Hyperlinks:
  • Hyperlinks need to have clearly defined labels of the destination of each link so that a screen reader is able to read them out loud when scanning the document.
  • It's preferable to embed link URLs (attach the URL in the background to a word or phrase using the Link function), also known as contextual links, rather than writing out URLs in the document.
• Tables:
  • Clear table structures and headers are necessary for a screen reader to be able to scan the document.
• Alt Text:
  • Alt Text data allows a screen reader to scan a description of tables, figures, or images that may be on the document.
• Lists:
  • The built in formatting tools of Word make it easier for the screen reader to scan the document.
• Capitalized Words:
  • Use bold for emphasis and avoiding capitalization of words.
  • Assistive devices may provide capitalized words to users by reading each individual letter, instead of complete words.
• Tab/Reading Order
  • For PDFs, identifying the reading order of a document’s text helps a screen reader present the text as it is meant to be read, rather than just as random blocks of text.
    

Creating Fully Functional PDFs from Word

With the latest versions of Word in Office365, all accessibility functionality in a Word source document may be directly transferred to a PDF version:

• Select File->Save As
• Change the file type (suffix) from the default Word Document (.docx) to PDF (.pdf).
  A PDF file created in this way includes all of your active hyperlinks and other functionality.
  

Creating Accessible Documents from Scanned Images

In order to make scanned document images accessible to a screen reader user, a few things need to be done, otherwise none of the information on the document can be read by a screen reader:

• Make or convert the scanned image to PDF
• Under Tools (in Adobe Acrobat Pro):
  • Select Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
  • Select Text Recognition and In This File, and
  • Select the pages to be included
• Under Tools:
  • Select Action Wizard, then
  • Select Make Accessible
  • Select Find Recognize Text Using OCR
• In the Recognize Text -- General Settings window:
  • Select the applicable language and
  • Select Searchable as the PDF Output Style
• Select OK
  

Accessibility Guides

The process of increasing equity in our policies and policy access is ongoing. Here are some accessibility guides to provide you with further ideas as you get started:

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
• U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) 18F Accessibility Guide
• WSU Web Communications Accessibility Guides