Training and templates for accessible documents
Thursday, 03 December 2009
We've been working on a problem faced by many organizations: how to create accessible MS Word and PDF documents. With some public sector websites containing up to 99% of their information in downloadable documents, this is an extremely important but badly neglected issue for accessibility.
We were asked by South Tipperary County Council to create MS Word templates and a user guide to enable their staff to produce County Development Plans and other documents that are as accessible as possible. The templates enforce structural markup using MS Word styles. The user guide explains how to maximise accessibility for each type of content - text, images, data tables, forms, etc. - and how to convert to even more accessible PDF and HTML formats. We hope to roll out a general 'tools and training' package in 2010 to help more organizations with this tricky but important process.