Top ten tips for producing accessible digital content

The new accessibility legislation applies to all UCL website content, e-learning and library systems.

If you are responsible for creating and managing online pages and files, you will need to review and update all your online content to meet the new standards, so that it can be accessed by people with disabilities. 

Tools and training to support the required changes

The significant job of reviewing and updating our online content will require support and guidance. ISD will provide tools to help scan files for accessibility problems and provide feedback on how to fix them, and run a training and awareness raising programme. Details of the first training sessions are now available (see below).

• Top tips for what you should do to ensure your digital content is accessible are listed below.
   
• You can find guidance on working with images, slides, documents, multimedia and other digital content on the ISD web pages.

If you have any questions please email digitalaccessibility@ucl.ac.uk

Training in creating accessible documents

You can now reserve a place on a Creating accessible documents training session. Sessions are available on 30 May, and on 5, 11, 20 and 25 June.

In the session, you will learn how to make sure your PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PDFs meet the new requirements.

Register for 'Creating accessible documents' training

Top ten tips for accessible content 

1. Use heading styles, and use them in a sensible hierarchy in both Word and web pages, and create bookmarks and document structure tags when creating PDFs. 
2. Add descriptive Alternative Text to images to help those who use screen readers (and if an image is purely decorative, use Alt=””). You should do this in Word and PowerPoint documents too, not just web pages. 
3. Use descriptive hyperlinks to direct your audience to other content instead of web address links (and never use ‘click here’). 
4. Use bullets and numbered lists to break up text – and use punctuation at the end of each item. 
5. Make sure text is in a big enough font in slides and written documents. 
6. Don’t underline text or it will be confused with links. 
7. Think about people with shade-blindness and colour-blindness, and use contrast and patterns to convey meaning as well as colour. Avoid using red, green and pink to convey information. Print colour items in black and white to see how the contrast works.
8. Include captions, transcripts and/or audio descriptions in multimedia if possible. 
9. Use Left Justified paragraphs, and increase your margins to reduce the width of blocks of textto improve readability. 
10. Run the 'Check Accessibility' tool on your Microsoft Office files – it will highlight areas for improvement.

And remember, by making your files fully accessible to people with disabilities, they will be easier for everyone to use.