Checklist Poster

Making Word documents accessible

The Disability Discrimination Act states that you must ensure your information is accessible to disabled people.

To meet the needs of disabled people:

• Avoid using small fonts and setting large blocks of text in italics.
• Use styles to add structure to your documents, e.g. use the heading style to create headings rather than just making text look like a heading by making it bold.
• Provide alternative labels for all images. To do this, right-click on the image, then select Format Picture. A dialogue box will appear. Select the Web tab and then add the appropriate alternative text.
• Create clear uncluttered pages, with plenty of white space. Use bulleted lists when appropriate as they can be easier to understand than long paragraphs.
• Avoid animated or flashing/blinking text.
• Ensure there is good contrast between elements on the page, e.g. text and background colours.
• Use the built-in table tools when creating columns of text. Don’t use tabs to create tables.
• Use descriptive link text for links, when linking to web pages within your documents.
• Add space around paragraphs using style formatting options rather than using carriage returns. This is particularly important if you intend to convert your Word documents into PDF files.
• Provide your staff with disability equality training. A key barrier for disabled people is negative attitudes towards them.
• If you have embedded sound files, provide a text transcript of the sound file content.

|Making Word Documents Accessible - Word file (31kb)
|Making Word Documents Accessible - pdf (17kb)

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