1. Accessibility Starters: Word and PDF documents
Sarah Alag
Chris Glenn
Steve Wettergren

2. Goals of this presentation
Recall why accessibility is important
Create accessible Word and PDF documents

3. MIT and Harvard In the News
The Law:
State and Federal regulations require equal access to resources and material for students who are otherwise qualified to enroll in the course and accessibility must be built in to all learning regardless of the mode of delivery (online, face-to-face).
Recent Litigation:
February 12, 2015-Federal lawsuits filed against Harvard and M.I.T., claiming both universities violated anti-discrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials. The case highlights the increasingly important role of online materials in higher education. M.I.T. and Harvard have extensive materials available free online, on platforms like YouTube, iTunesU, and MIT OpenCourseWare. Both universities are the founding partners of edX, a nonprofit that offers dozens of MOOCs, or massive open online courses, free to students around the world.
to-caption-online-courses.html?_r=0

4. Making Word documents Accessible
Use Styles
Add Alt Text to images and Tables (and define header row)
Avoid Text Boxes
Used named URLs
Avoid Tabs and spaces to layout text
Be consistent with fonts
Run the Accessibility Checker

5. Making Accessible PDFs
Starting from Word…
Make sure the Word document is accessible
Save as PDF (not print to PDF). Will make a more accessible document.
Ensure Document Structure Tags are an enabled option.
In Adobe Acrobat run the Accessibility Checker
Correct Any Errors

6. Working with Existing PDFs
More tricky…
Confirm if the file is text based or not
If not, try to Recognize the Text
Try to use the “Read Out Loud” function
Run the Accessibility Checker
Correct any errors

7. Next Workshop
PowerPoints and Text Alternatives – March 25th at 10:00am in A102

8. Questions