Documents & PDFs

When creating digital documents, there are a few basic issues to keep in mind to ensure your content is accessible. These issues are the same regardless of whether your document is in HTML (a web page), Word, PowerPoint, PDF or another document format. 

The following steps provide a recommended path to more accessible digital documents.

Step 1. Build an understanding of digital document accessibility

Guidance

The following pages on the current website are a great place to start for understanding digital accessibility broadly:

• Getting Started with Digital Accessibility

The following pages are a good starting point for learning specifically about accessibility as it applies to common types of digital documents:

• Providing Digitally Accessible Documents
• Presentations
• Checking Microsoft Office Documents for Accessibility
• PDFs from Microsoft Word
• PDFs from PowerPoint
• Checking PDFs for Accessibility

Training

Training opportunities are available at UWM, including digital accessibility training created specifically for UWM and general digital accessibility training available through LinkedIn Learning (free to everyone in the UWM community). You can learn at your own pace with LinkedIn Learning after logging in with your UWM credentials. You can find many digital accessibility training options by searching LinkedIn Learning or start with a recommended list of digital accessibility training courses created by the Universities of Wisconsin.

Step 2. Prioritize and review your documents

Accessibility is a journey. Where do you start? Prioritize reviewing your content by focusing on what will affect users most frequently and significantly. Start with core materials used regularly and address the issues that are most straightforward to fix. Starting with the highest priority documents, use the following tools and procedures to evaluate them.

Use Accessibility Checkers

• Microsoft Office includes a built-in accessibility checker, offering both a summary on request and real-time feedback for authors creating Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. For more information, visit Checking Microsoft Office Documents for Accessibility.
• PDF: Adobe Acrobat Pro provides features that enable users to check and fix accessibility within PDFs. For more information, visit Checking PDFs for Accessibility.
• Canvas: There are multiple options for checking the accessibility of documents uploaded to Canvas. For more information, visit the providing digitally accessible course materials and training pages.

Conduct a Manual Review

Built-in accessibility checkers are helpful, but they are not complete. They detect rule-based issues, but they cannot evaluate content for logical reading order or contextual appropriateness. While accessibility checkers are a good starting point, the following items are important to review:

1. Do headings form an outline of the page content?
2. Do images have meaningful alternative text (no images of text), and are non-important images marked as decorative? 
3. Are tables used solely for presenting rows and columns of data (not for layout), and are the column and row headers properly identified? 
4. Are lists used to identify all content that can be described as a list of something? 
5. Is the proper metadata included? 
   1. Does the document have a title that describes its topic or purpose? 
   2. Has the language of the document (or individual parts of a multilingual document) been defined? 

For a more extensive list items to review, see the Digital Accessibility Fundamentals Checklist.

Step 3. Clean house

A big step in ensuring your content is accessible is deleting content that is no longer needed. If content is no longer actively maintained but is needed for historical reference, content should be clearly labeled as “Archived.” 

UWM has published Archived Web Content Guidance to help you determine whether older content should be deleted, archived or remediated. 

Step 4. Use UWM-branded themes

UWM-branded PowerPoint templates are available. These templates have been reviewed for accessibility, but it is always advisable to review the final documents again for accessibility after adding content to the templates (see Step 2, point 1: Use accessibility checkers).

Step 5. Get help

If you get stuck with any of the previous steps, or simply have questions along the way, submit a Help Desk support request.