3.8. Documents and Files
Challenge
Consider the documents and files you share with students in your courses. Are you confident that someone with visual impairments, using assistive technology, could interpret all of the information within them?
Creating accessible documents and files is about ensuring all students can fully engage with the content you provide, regardless of their abilities or impairments. Accessible documents enable students who rely on assistive technologies, such as screen readers or alternative input devices, to interact with the material in meaningful ways. Barriers to accessing content — such as poorly structured documents, or unreadable PDFs — can prevent some students from fully participating in the learning process. Additionally, accessible design benefits everyone by promoting clarity, consistency, and usability, which can enhance the learning experience for all students, not just those with disabilities.
The following guidelines will help you make accessible documents and files for your courses.
✅ Provide text content in an easily accessed format (preferably HTML). HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is one of the most accessible formats for delivering text content because it’s naturally structured, flexible, and compatible with a wide range of assistive technologies, such as screen readers. HTML also allows for responsive design, meaning the content can easily adapt to different devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, desktops) and adjust for font size or contrast settings that users may require. Whenever possible, presenting text in HTML ensures that it’s readily accessible without the need for additional tools or downloads. The good news is that when you place text into an LMS (like Canvas) or into most other webpage publishing platforms, you’ve already provided it in a very accessible HTML format!
Web Resources
There are accessibility checker tools available that can be a helpful addition to human review when building webpages. See the following links for more info:
✅ Provide documents/files that are readable by assistive technology. It’s important to realize that, unlike HTML, not all file formats are automatically readable by assistive technologies. PDFs, for example, need to be properly tagged to allow screen readers to interpret the content. If you’ve ever opened a PDF that did not allow you to highlight, select, or search the text, there’s a good chance it would not be readable by assistive technology. This is fairly common with PDFs that are scanned out of physical materials (like older books) — if improperly captured, they are essentially “flat images” with no text information encoded.
🔎 USask Lens:
If you need help getting high-quality and accessible PDF scans of physical materials, consider using the USask Library Scan Request service, where you can get digital copies of print materials from the libary collection directly to your inbox (in accordance with Fair Dealing Guidelines).
✅ Use meaningful filenames, with lowercase text and avoiding spaces and special characters. Especially important when files are meant to be downloaded, descriptive filenames are much easier for all users to find and identify on their devices than something more generic (e.g., doc1.pdf is not as good of a filename as something more descriptive like plsc234-organic-techniques.pdf). Whatever naming convention you choose for your course files, be consistent. For compatibility across an array of web and assistive technologies, only use lowercase text, and avoid using spaces and special characters. If you need to separate words, hyphens (-) are generally better than underscores (_).
✅ Create documents/files that meet the previous criteria discussed in this chapter. To ensure content is accessible, any text-based content in Word documents, PDFs, or other downloadable file types should be created while following the same accessibility practices that apply to building webpages – that means proper headings, alt text for images, sufficient color contrast and white space, avoiding complex tables, meaningful link text, etc. In short, the practices covered in the earlier sections of this chapter can apply on a smaller level to the creation of a single Word document, or a single PDF.
Web Resources
In order to create accessible documents/files, or verify their accessibility, the following links may be helpful.
For Word documents and other Microsoft Office files:
For PDFs:
Reflection: One Small Step
Try one of the following:
- Go to a page in one of your Canvas courses, and run the Canvas Accessibility Checker.
- Find a Word document you’ve used in your teaching, and run the Microsoft Accessibility Checker.
