Accessible Documents Quick Checks

Is this document accessible? You might encounter documents that you're not sure if they're accessible. Here are some initial questions to ask about a document to discern if it is accessible.

A Two-Minute Quick Check for a Digital PDF Document 

  1. Open the PDF document with Adobe Reader.
  2. Can you highlight the text? 
  3. Can you have the text read it back to you by selecting the Read Out Loud feature from Adobe Reader’s View menu?   
  4. If you are scanning a document, have you gone through the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process to test if your document can be read out loud? 
  5. If you are scanning an image or photo, have you provided alternative text or captions to describe your image/photo?
If answers from (2) to (5) are “yes”, then the document is accessible. Please note that images, photographs or objects will not be read.   

The L.I.S.T. Check for a Digital Word Document

  1. Do you have any web Links in your document? 

    If yes, provide a meaningful name for the website, hyperlink the website name and include the URL.

  2. Do you have any Images, photos or videos in your document?

    If yes, provide alternative text to describe your images and add captions for your videos. 

  3. Do you have any Structure for your document? 

    Use heading styles to assign structure to your document and the “spacing before and after” paragraph feature (under the heading styles) to modify the space between paragraphs.

  4. Do you have a Table in your document? 

    If yes, note the reading order for your tabular information is from left to right and one line at a time. Repeat the table header row on top of each page if the table expands more than one page. 

The S.L.I.C. Check for a Digital PowerPoint Document

  1. Do you have any Structure for your slide document? 
  2. To ensure structure, click the Outline tab of your slide, 
    1. include a title for each slide,
    2. use one of the built-in slide templates under New Slide to create new slides, and 
    3. do not use text boxes. Texts not displayed on the Outline tab will not be read.

  3. Do you have any web Links in your document?

    If yes, provide a meaningful name for the website, hyperlink the website name and include the URL.

  4. Do you have any Images, photos or videos in your document? 

    If yes, provide alternative text to describe your images and add captions for your videos.

  5. Do you have a Chart or table in your document? 

    Use the embedded chart or table tools within the slide template to create your chart or table. If you want to use your original data, ensure you import the data (not the chart), attach the original source data and provide a description to explain your chart or table. 

For more detailed instructions on creating accessible documents, watch this short tutorial from CU Boulder’s Universal Instructional Designer Alaina Beaver on how to properly format a Microsoft Word document so that it is fully accessible to screen reader users. 

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