Before saving your Word document, you can improve its accessibility by optimizing content elements such as headings, images, lists, tables and hyperlinks. Reviewing these content elements ensures that your Word document provides the greatest level of accessibility to all users.
Most users can visually scan a page to get an idea of the content and organization. Users who are blind or have a visual impairment use screen readers that scan the page looking for section headings; this builds an outline of the page that can be displayed or read to the user.
As its name indicates, Word is primarily geared toward editing text. More recent versions of the software, however, have increased functionality to handle various types of images and other non-textual elements, including inserting clip-art or an image from a file, creating "Word Art," or using drawing tools to create other shapes.
For visually impaired users, users whose browsers cannot support images or users who have elected not to download images, it is vital to define alternative text equivalents, or "alt" text, for any images within the document. Word 2000 and XP both provide the ability to insert "alt" text for images or drawing objects created, and in fact sometimes Word will try to approximate the appropriate "alt" text. However, it is important that you check this text to make sure it is meaningful and the equivalent to your intentions.
Image 2: Format a "Picture" within Word
Image 3: Add alternate text in Web tab of Format Picture dialog box
Image 4: Format Picture dialog with alternate text entered in the boxFor decorative images that add nothing to the content of the page, it is acceptable to have blank alt text. Unfortunately, Word does not support creating an empty "alt" text for images, which means the HTML code must be edited after the page is exported. When "alt" text for an image has not been specified, screen readers will usually read the image file name, which can potentially cause confusion with visually impaired users.
A bulleted or numbered list is another commonly used element within Word documents, and also require certain oversight to ensure usability. The most important consideration is to make sure that you have appropriately used Word's list features, instead of using an asterisk (*) or hyphen (-) to give the appearance of a list. In the sample document for this module, both list styles have been used.
Select this icon to create a numbered list
Select this icon to create a bulleted list
Using the appropriate list feature will ensure that
the HTML Word generates has the proper code to distinguish the text as
a list.
Word also contains the ability to properly format tables
in the document. The W3C
WAI specification
says that you should avoid using tables for layout unless the tables linearize
gracefully, a vague guideline that often creates controversy among designers.
Today's screen readers can generally handle tables better than they could
a few years ago, but many accessibility experts prefer to take the conservative
approach and avoid layout tables altogether.
Tables that represent data need to be sized using percentages instead of a fixed number of pixels. Some users have older monitors with low resolutions and some users choose to set their resolutions lower so that output on the screen displays larger. Using relatively-sized tables ensures that the table appears the way you intended regardless of monitor size and resolution, and reduces the amount of scrolling a user must do to see the whole table. Word 2000 and XP both allow you to set the unit of measure for a table to percent.
Image 5: Right-click menu with Table Properties selected
Image 6: Right-click menu with Table Properties selectedIn doing this, your tables will be formatted based upon percentages rather than fixed numeric values, improving the display accessibility of the document.
Word should maintain the original column width when you switch to percents, but sometimes it resets all columns to equal widths so you may need to resize the columns. You will need to repeat this process for all tables in your document.
Finally, check any hyperlinks in the document. Many screen readers also generate a list of links for each page or allow the user to skip from one link to the next. Hyperlinks like "Click here" are not accessible and make little sense to a user when taken out of context; a better approach is to make each hyperlink descriptive of the content to which it links. You can quickly scan through the document and make sure that the text of each of your hyperlinks makes sense if read out of order or separately from the surrounding text.
Now you have made all the preparations you can in Word. At this point, you have two options for saving and publishing the Word document:
The next page presents information on uploading Word files to a website.
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