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Accessibility Videos and Podcasts

Is Your Document Accessible?
Transcript

(2 minutes, 57 seconds, 2.1 MB)

Author:  Neal Ewers, Ravenswood Productions
Local phone:  608-277-1995, Toll Free:  888-544-8332
Email:  neal.ewers@ravenswood.org, http://www.ravenswood.org

I think there are two things that make a document accessible. First of all the information has to be present. That seems kind of obvious, actually, but it really doesn’t always happen. If for example you have a printer that is almost out of ink, and you print something, and the text is almost illegible, then that information isn’t really there. If the color contrast between the paper and the ink is such that the document can’t be read easily, then again, that information isn’t really there.

If you’ve created a document, by making an image of a page, and that image is not really clear, then the document can be very fuzzy and some people won’t be able to read it. And if you try to enlarge that image with magnification software, the text is going to be so grainy that it is not going to be able to be read either. In addition, if you try to read that text with any kind of speech software, which you might be using to supplement what you are seeing, the information won’t be read because screen reading software only reads information that is text oriented, not graphical.

So there are any number of reasons why the information just may not be there in the first place.

Secondly, the information that is there has to be able to be navigated in such a way that the user can understand the document based on how it is laid out. In the early days when people were using ASCII text files, you could get a document with line after line after line of unbroken text. How is one supposed to know where the paragraph boundaries were, where the headers were, where the list items were, etcetera?  So the information was there, but you weren’t able to navigate to the parts of the document you needed.

If I’m writing a document and I want certain points to be obvious, I’m going either leave white space around them so that they stand out, I’m going to make them a different color, I’m going to make them a different size, I’m going to make them bold print, or italic, or whatever. I’m going to do something to help people get to the points of the document that I think are relevant as quickly as they can. So a document has to be navigable.

People are likely going to be reading your document using different forms of reading devices. Some people might look at it visually, and that is enough for them. Some people might use voice or screen reading technology to listen to the document at the same time they are reading it in print. Some people may use it on a computer. Some people may look at it on paper. In whatever way the document is used, it has to be able to be navigated in a way that people can get to the points they want to get to. That means you have to give some thought to the layout of the document just as you do to the content. So if the information is there and readable, and if it is able to be navigable, that goes a long way towards making it accessible.