Word Documents

• Preparing Document for Accessibility so that it is accessible and it will export into other formats (HTML, PDF) to best promote accessibility
• Word markup for faculty feedback - cognition issues as well as assistive tech issues

Fonts

(Same as Fonts under HTML)

Font color to convey meaning should be avoided.  Other means of conveying meaning has to accompany such visual means.

Style Elements

Adding proper style elements within your Word document helps assistive technologies navigate and convey organization properly while also making the conversion to HTML more accessible. The reasons for adding headings within Word documents are similar to the reasons we have headings within HTML pages. At first thought it is simply a way to format text to convey visual organization. This is why we make headings in Word documents bolded and in a larger font. The issue with this method is that assistive technologies such as screen readers will not differentiate the larger, bolded text, from the smaller, non-bolded text. The organization if the document is therefore lost when using a screen reader. This can be compared to styling headings with CSS as opposed to the h1,h3,h4,... tags.

Word provides us with styling options that will help the organization of the document both visually as well as with the use of a screen reader.

We can think of our Word documents as a book.

By viewing your document with the outline option under the View menu, you can better see the structure of your document and how the content is nested within the headings.

Tables

Tables in Word...

Word 2008 for Mac

Mouse over the table and right click on the little "Position Table" icon, which should select or highlight the entire table, (if not highlight the entire table manually then right click). Choose Table Properties from the menu and select the Rows tab. You should see "Rows 1 - x (where x = the total amount of rows in the table) listed under the Size section. If you do see that, un-check the box next to "Allow row to break across pages" under the Options section. This will ensure that information is not broken up between pages, which will help both with screen readers and cognitive disabilities.

In the same window, click the next row button at the bottom of the window so that you see "Row: 1" (or the row that the cells are headers for each respective column) listed just below the Size area. Check the box that says, "Repeat as header row at the top of each page". By doing that, when the table continues onto the next page, the screen reader will read the header again to help keep the user in the right place. For a bit of context, the reason this helps is because the screen reader may break the table up by reading the document header printed at the top of the page before continuing onto the rest of the table. It is also important for any documents that will be converted into PDF.

When you have cells in the first column that should also be table headers, you need to have all of the text in each cell on a single line. This doesn't affect the word document’s accessibility, however, when you save the document to a PDF, it will treat the first line as a header for the first line of the remaining cells in that row and the second line as the header for the remaining lines in the cells for that row.

Hyperlinks

Links should be named in a way that is descriptive of the page you are linking to. Because Word 2004-2008 for Mac does not support link title attributes this is especially important.

You can edit the name of the link in Word 2008 for MAC by doing the following:

1. Right click the link and highlight “Hyperlink”, then select Edit Hyperlink
2. Leave the url as it is but change the link name to something that appropriately titles the link

Word 2007 for Windows will allow you to add a title attribute however; it is called a “Screen Tip” instead of a “title” attribute.

You can add the title attribute by doing the following:

1. Create the link
2. Right click the link and choose Edit Hyperlink…
3. Click the ScreenTip.. button in the upper right corner
4. Enter the link title in the text box and click OK

Also remember to name the link appropriately.  By going through those steps, the document will be more accessible when read with a screen reader and the “ScreenTip” you entered will be used for the title attribute when using simple editor or Dreamweaver to convert the document to HTML.

Images

After adding an image to your word document you have a few options available for adding accessibility. You should always include a caption for any pictures included in your document. The caption should identify the image in the way that a title would while keeping in mind its context in relation to the materials that reference it.

The first thing that you should do is to add an alt tag to the image. You can do this in Word 2000-2003 by right clicking on the picture and choosing Format Picture. In that window select the Web tab and enter the alternative text in the text box provided. In Word 2007, you right click on the image, select Size, then choose the Alt Text tab and enter the alternative text in the text box provided. Unfortunately, in Word 2004-2008 for Mac, there is not an option to add alternative text to an image.