Documents, here, are any portable file that is to be read with a word processor or rich text editor. Documents can also be in plain text, or use Markdown or other markup languages. Use your best judgment for including these guidelines, as some don’t apply to some document types.
The prime directive is to communicate with users. The user will generally know what they would like rather than what wouldn’t help or even hinder their experience. Some users may have different ideas of what is “accessible” versus other users. In cases like this, you’ll either need to choose between the two ideas, or give the users a choice between the two (preferable). When it comes to accessibility, choice is never a bad thing. Your users will thank you for giving them something that makes their own experience enjoyable, productive, or both.
This section will concern users who have either only light perception or cannot see anything at all. People who have limited vision will be addressed in another section.
Certain formats such as PDFs are very difficult to make completely accessible; many PDFs, for example, are just collections of images, or have issues such as words not being separated by spaces and images not being labeled. Different PDF readers often interpret things differently, leading to an inconsistent and difficult experience.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of formats that are more friendly to accessibility:
- The Open Document Format (ODF)
- EPUB
- Microsoft Word
- The Rich Text Format (RTF)
Plain text is also an option for short documents which do not use “rich” text elements such as headings, links, and tables.
If you are writing a large document, use headings to mark sections. Be sure to use the heading style, and not just bold the text of the section name and enlarge the font. This allows blind users to navigate from heading to heading in order to review the document much more quickly.
Always label images that you put into your document. You can do this by adding a “caption” or “description” to the image during or after you put it into the document.
Tables can have headers, either for columns or for rows. This usually allows the word processor to tell the screen reader the title of the row or column it’s in.