I often get asked about what organizations should be doing to improve their service
and the accessibility of their communications for people with disabilities. It can often be difficult to figure out what tangible activities should be looked at and where to focus one’s initial energy. I’ve written this article to try and provide a framework for activity that relates to the Information & Communication Technology area of ensuring accessibility.
Most businesses today conduct a large part of their communications, information and
service delivery using an “online” or electronic component. Standards exist for accessibility in all major areas of Information & Communication Technologies.
In Part 1 of Concrete Steps towards Improving Accessibility & large organizations and service areas, we explored some tangible steps that an organization can take to improve it’s web presence.
When not otherwise identified, the term “accessible” refers to a format that meets the AA level of conformance of the WCAG2 standard W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This may seem like a significant amount of work or a significant change in corporate culture; however, I assure you that the amount of effort in addressing these issues in a less systemic fashion is more costly, more effort, more trouble and leads to many possible larger issues later on down the road.
One of the areas that is most often forgotten or receives the least amount of attention is the documents organizations create; especially the internal documents that are created prior to publishing.& A small amount of effort placed on the creation of structured and well designed documents will yield huge benefits when you want to publish the material in another format or medium. Web publishers have known this for years, especially the ones that have been stuck fixing poorly created source documents prior to publishing on the web. For more benefits of structured documents and how they can improve your ability to respond to a multiple format request (such as braille, audio, large print, daisy etc) check out the following article: Modern Multiple Format Production and the role of Daisy .
The Center for Assistive Technology & Environmental Access (CATEA) at Georgia Tech has created guidelines to help educators understand what they need to do in creating accessible documents within the Microsoft Office Suite. These are a rather nice start because they break the requirements down into categories of “must”, “should” and “may” and cover not just word documents but excel and other document formats: CATEA Accessible Document Creation Guidelines
Web Accessibility In Mind (WebAIM) have created a rather comprehensive document about creating accessible word documents WebAIM Accessible Word Techniques
Microsoft has their own reference material that covers how to create accessible documents: Microsoft Accessible Word Guidelines