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 content. 
• Add alternative text to images. These descriptions should be meaningful. If the image doesn’t add any information, mark it as ‘decorative’.  
• Ensure there is sufficient colour contrast between foreground and background colours.

Below are some recommendations for making your Word documents 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, Arial). Min 24 size.  
• 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.
• Alternative text: Add meaningful descriptions to your images. If an image doesn’t add any information, mark it as ‘decorative’.  
• Colour contrast: be mindful of colour contrast – for example, avoid grey text or green text on a red background as these can be difficult to read.

You can export accessible PDFs from Word and PowerPoint files — so if you have followed the steps in the sections above for these formats, the exported PDF should retain these accessibility features. 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 the labels for context. 
• Give sheets meaningful titles as this helps give those using screen readers context. 
• 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 your 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 or a narration of content for those with visual impairments. 
• If your video involves someone talking to camera, make sure that there is good lighting, supporting 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.