DE Oracle @ UMUC

Accessibility and Efficiency in Document Preparation

CSI Staff

Staff Writer

Center for Support of Instruction

Published: May-June 2005

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Accessibility

In preparing documents for online classes, accessibility (see also the March-April 2005 Accessibility article) is

• part legal issue: do the documents easily offer the same information to a person with a sight impairment as to a normally sighted person, in compliance with applicable laws?
• part " usability" issue: are the documents well designed and do they offer flexible access and use by a variety of users with a variety of computer setups?
• part efficiency issue: can the documents be reused as-is without "retrofitting" for compliance when the need arises?

In short, Accessibility = Compliance + (Re)Usability

The legal aspects of whether documents are "accessible" to students with sight impairments don't necessarily apply to every instance the documents are used.   However, a major consideration when instructors take the time to carefully prepare complex content documents such as lecturettes for WebTycho classes is the ability to reuse the documents from semester to semester.   Do instructors want to have to recreate the documents in accessible format when a sight-impaired student registers for a class?   It's best to consider and provide accessibility up front.   Besides, there are many examples of how designing for compliance benefits other users than just those covered by the law.

Benefits of PDF Documents Compared to Other Document Types

A second consideration when creating content for WebTycho is how best to prepare and present those documents in the online classroom.   There are a variety of document creation types and procedures, each with its own benefits and drawbacks, e.g., attached word-processed document; linked webpage; pasted plain text; pasted HTML text; attached PDF file, etc.

Creating and attaching PDF files in the WebTycho classroom combines many of the benefits and few of the drawbacks of other methods of providing content in WebTycho.

PDF files

• Cannot carry viruses to students
• Quickly (especially in Acrobat 7) open in browsers without requiring a download or opening a virus scanner
• Can include images, formatted text
• Are attractive and professional looking when printed (in fact, aside from accessibility concerns, PDF files are well suited to documents that are likely to be printed)
• Are relatively easy to create: they can be composed in MS Word, then converted in a single step using Acrobat software via a button added into MS Word
• Are easy to provide in WebTycho via normal attachment functions (no need for auxiliary accounts, software, or extra steps such as are needed for creating, uploading, and linking to webpages)
• Are secure within the password-protected WebTycho environment (unlike webpages hosted on outside servers such as Polaris)

In addition,

• With planning and some adjustment of the method of creating the precursor word-processed document (e.g., MS Word), PDF documents can be created to be compliant with legal requirements for accessibility for sight-impaired users, as well as for all-around "usability."
• As an added benefit, PDF files increasingly can be set up to restrict a reader's ability to reuse the material.

Accessibility in PDF Files

Simply converting a Word document to PDF does not inherently make it compliant or accessible to those students who need to enlarge documents or who need to use an audible, mechanical character/screen reader program.   Several basic adjustments are needed to provide accessibility in MS Word documents that are converted to PDF documents for use in WebTycho. The methods listed below are designed not only make audible readings of the text more simple and complete for compliance reasons but also help the documents to be displayed and read properly in a variety of computer settings. These methods are based on using MS Word because WordPerfect documents do not convert as well to PDF.

When composing a PDF precursor document in MS Word,

• Provide helpful interpretive text ("alt text") for ALL illustrations, charts, photos, etc. to provide a text method for understanding the purpose and value of the images to those who cannot clearly see the images.
  • Right-click on image, select Format Picture, select Web tab, type alt text, OK

  

• Properly configure links (URLs, email) so they work properly after conversion to PDF.
  • Use Word's Insert Hyperlink tool

  

• Use MS Word's Styles features to reduce the mechanical reading of unnecessary paragraph and other formatting tags.
  
  This means that an audible screen reader won't have to describe complex formatting commands embedded in the document (e.g., "font style Arial, font size 28, centered, bold, spacing before 5 points, spacing after 10 points") but rather provide simpler, functional descriptions of the formatting (e.g., "Heading level 1").
  • For an introduction to using MS Word's Styles, see, for example, a MS Word Styles Introduction at the Microsoft website, or use MS Word's HELP files, "About Formatting Text by Using Styles."

  

• Limit use of column and table formats, if possible, since different mechanical screen reader programs follow different conventions for order of reading (down-across vs. across-down).
• Avoid using forms since they don't convert well and aren't assessed by Adobe Acrobat's accessibility checker.
• Avoid using footnotes and non-Unicode (non-Ascii) characters, since they aren't easy for mechanical screen readers to interpret.  MS Word's curly or "smart" quotes and em-dashes should not be used for this reason.
• DO retain the original MS Word .doc file to edit and reconvert later as needed, rather than edit the PDF file; otherwise, the descriptive tagging will have to be reinserted manually.

While all of the above accommodations CAN be retrofitted into an existing PDF document, the process is time-consuming, highly technical, and cumbersome.   Basically, the idea here is to use the efficient document handling features already built into MS Word to enhance the accessibility and flexible use of the documents when converted to PDF. That is, the key to efficient, successful creation of accessible PDFs is to build accessibility in the source MS Word file and then convert it to PDF.