Making Your Materials More Accessible

Below are some recommendations for making your Word documents more accessible. You can use Trinity's Word templates and Word's Accessibility Checker to help with some of these items.

• Use a sans serif font (Calibri is Trinity's recommended font for Word documents) with a minimum size of 12.  
• Emphasise text using bold instead of ALL CAPS, italics, underlined or colour text as these can be difficult for people to read.
• Use headings to organise your document which will make it easier for students to navigate using a range of assistive technologies.
• Add alternative text to images. These descriptions should be meaningful and should generally be a sentence or two in length. If the image is just there for visual interest, you can mark it as ‘decorative’.  
• Ensure there is sufficient colour contrast between foreground and background colours.

Below are some recommendations for making your PowerPoint files more accessible. You can use Trinity's PowerPoint templates and PowerPoint's Accessibility Checker to help with some of these items.

• Use a sans serif font (Calibri is Trinity's recommended font for PowerPoint) with a recommended size of 24 and minimum of 18.
• Emphasise text using bold instead of ALL CAPS, italics, underlined or colour text as these can be difficult for people to read.
• Add titles to all slides using a ‘Title Placeholder’ rather than a ‘Text Box’ — using Trinity's PowerPoint templates will help with this.
• Add alternative text to images. These descriptions should be meaningful and should generally be a sentence or two in length. If the image is just there for visual interest, you can mark it as ‘decorative’.  
• Ensure there is sufficient colour contrast between foreground and background colours. For example, avoid light grey text on a white background or green text on a red background as these can be difficult to read.

You can create accessible PDFs by exporting them from Word and PowerPoint files — so if you have followed the steps in the sections above for these formats, the exported PDFs should retain any accessibility features such as headers and alternative text etc. You can also check a PDF's accessibility score once you upload it to Blackboard via Ally's file accessibility viewer.

Some suggestions for creating more accessible Excel files include:

• Avoid merged cells as a screen reader will be unable to parse these correctly.
• Label everything as people using screen readers use these labels for context. 
• Give sheets meaningful titles as this helps those using screen readers to navigate them. 
• Avoid blank sheets as these will be read by a screen reader and will waste time for some students.
• Use text to signal the end of a document so that people who use screen readers will know they have reached the end of the file.

You can visit Microsoft's website for more in-depth information on creating accessible Excel files.

For most teaching staff, using Panopto within Blackboard is the best way to host your videos. Panopto contains a range of in-built accessibility features and options which make it easier for students to navigate videos. For information on Panopto's automatic captions and how to adjust these where needed, please visit the Panopto FAQ on the IT Services website.

Some other recommendations include:

• Avoid flashing content for people who have epilepsy or are light sensitive. 
• Add an audio description of content for those with visual impairments — for example, you might briefly describe an image that appears on screen.
• If your video involves someone talking to camera, make sure that there is good lighting which will help those who may lip read.
• If you are recording a PowerPoint presentation, use Trinity's PowerPoint templates for visual consistency.
• Add a table of contents in Panopto to help students navigate videos more easily.