OverviewTo be accessible, electronic documents must be created with accessibility in mind. Well designed documents created with the proper use of the structural mark-up and styles built-in within the authoring software are accessible to assistive technology and can be easily converted to other formats without loosing their visual appearance and semantic structure.
Creating accessible electronic documents requires more than simply representing the print document in an electronic format. Print documents use typographical elements like font type and size, color, weight, white spacing and layout etc for visual presentation and to establish hierarchical organization for of a document (TOC, chapter, section, titles, headings, paragraph, sentence, etc).
Electronic documents use programmatic mark-up conventions to identify the semantic structure, to define and establishes relationship between structural elements and Style conventions (instruction set on fonts type, size, color, position, line spacing, margins etc) to control the formatting and visual presentation of a document.
Sighted readers use these presentation attributes as visual cues to differentiate between content objects, set relationship between distinct blocks of text (sections, paragraphs, columns, headers, footers etc), to define the reading order and to establish the order of importance. This helps then make decisions on where to focus their attention as they scan and read the content.
Screen readers used by sight impaired readers, process documents in a linear manner, using the programmatic and presentation markup to identify content objects, define the text blocks and establish a reading order. In addition, screen readers provide keystrokes that use the semantic markup as cues to interpret the position and layout of content blocks allowing the user to move quickly between different elements to scan and navigate the document for relevant information.
Most Office Applications (MS Office, OpenOffice, WordPerfect, StarOffice) integrate well with assistive technology allow the user to easily read and navigate the document.
On the web, these documents are either available for download to be viewed on the desktop using the native application, or opened within the browser using a plug-in. Plug-ins for MS Office documents are called Viewers. Viewers let you read and print the document but not edit and save the document. Acrobat Reader is a plug-in used to view, print and search PDF documents.
Characteristic of Accessible Documents
- Correct reading order is fundamental to creating accessible documents. Content objects must always be placed in a logical reading-order. This helps the document flow correctly when rendered on small screen, screen-less devices or when using assistive devices
- Built-in software features are used to create structural elements like paragraphs, tables, lists, columns, and headings etc. and to encode semantic structure and create a hierarchical reading order.
- Styles are used to control visual elements for presentation and layout.
- Text-descriptors are provided for all essential non-textual objects (graphs, illustrations, images, multimedia etc)
- Text transcripts and / or captions are provided for all video/ audio content included in the document
- All navigation and interactivity can also be performed using the keyboard
- When creating forms, all information including directions, cues and labels for field elements are accessible to assistive technology
- When using data tables the header row and column must be programatically identified
Tutorials are avaialbe to help people create accessible documents
