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Digital Accessibility |

Creating Accessible Documents

In this resource, we cover:

What Are Accessible Documents?

Accessible documents aim to provide all users—including those with sensory, motor, and cognitive disabilities—an equal opportunity to perceive, navigate, and understand course materials, whether those are PDFs, Google documents, or Canvas sites.

Why Do We Need Accessible Documents? 

Accessibility lies at the heart of Notre Dame’s Catholic mission. By helping every student fully participate in learning, we honor the dignity of each person and strengthen our community. Inaccessible documents create real barriers: Students struggle to access course content, waste time on frustrating workarounds, lose valuable learning opportunities, and experience exclusion from a community meant to welcome everyone.

How Do We Create Accessible Documents?

Here are some practical steps to follow to create accessible documents.

General Document Requirements

  • Color Contrast: The text and background colors must have enough contrast to ensure that the text is clear for all users. Avoid using any color as the only indicator of importance. Use a color-contrast checker to verify the contrast ratio between your text and background is acceptable.
  • Headings: Headings should be structured hierarchically without skipping levels (e.g., avoiding going from h1 directly to h3), not just big text.
  • Accessible Fonts: Use clear, sans serif typefaces like Arial or Calibri to enhance legibility for users with visual impairments or reading disabilities.
  • Descriptive Links: Use descriptive phrasing in links—for example, “WCAG 2 Overview” instead of “Click here to learn how to meet WCAG Guidelines.”
  • Alternative Text: For all images and charts, right-click and add alt text. Provide a brief description of the “why”  and “what”  of the image. Mark decorative-only images accordingly if the tool allows, or keep descriptions very brief.
  • Tables: Only use tables for data, not for visual positioning. Ensure the top row is designated as a header so screen readers can associate data cells with their appropriate category.
  • Accessibility Checkers: Use the Grackle Accessibility Checker (Grackle Docs, Grackle Slides, Grackle Sheets), a third-party add-on for Google Workspace, to scan for errors like missing alt text or broken heading hierarchies that Google’s native tools might miss.

For more information, please review Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

PDFs

Beyond the general document requirements mentioned in the previous section, there are several additional considerations to keep in mind in order to make a PDF accessible.

  • Scanned PDFs: Scanned images of text are inaccessible. Make sure to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert scanned paper documents, PDFs, or images captured with a digital camera into editable and searchable data.
  • Tagging and Reading Order: Tags and reading order are essential for screen reader accessibility. Tags are labels (like <p>, <figure>, or <h1>) that define the type of content. They allow screen readers to identify and describe each content element. Reading order determines the sequence in which these tags are read by a screen reader. Although sighted users naturally read content from top to bottom and left to right, complex layouts such as those with multiple columns, sidebars, or embedded images can confuse computers. To prevent confusion for screen reader users, always ensure that content elements are properly tagged and ordered sequentially.
  • Navigational Aids: Improve document navigation by incorporating bookmarks and a structured Table of Contents.

To create an accessible PDF, please check out Adobe’s detailed guidelines on Creating Accessible PDFs.

Where to Go for Help

If you have questions about how to integrate digital accessibility into your course materials, please contact the Office of Digital Learning (online@nd.edu).