Ensure Documents are Accessible

Text-based Materials

We often provide information to our students in a number of text-based formats such as Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF files. Visually impaired learners that rely on screen-reading software often find these documents to be inaccessible for a variety of reasons. One of the most common accessibility issues relates to documents that were created as a result of a document scanning process. If the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) option is not enabled, the document that results from the scanning process contains an image of the text, and not actual text.

How Can You Tell?

While there are a number of ways to determine if a document is able to be read by a screen reader, perhaps the easiest method is the "copy and paste" test. If you can individually select a few words from a document and then paste those same exact words into another document without all of the other words in the document being copied along with them, your text is screen-reader friendly.

It is also especially important to note that many publisher-provided materials may be inaccessible by design. Some publishers do not want their content copied, and thus the text information is presented as an image. You can use the same "copy and paste" test to determine if text within presentation slides are accessible. If you can individually select a few words from a presentation slide and then paste those same exact words into another document without all of the other words in the slide being copied along with them, your text is screen-reader friendly.

Reducing Inaccessible Documents

As mentioned previously, when scanning documents, enable the OCR option so that the text will be scanned into the document as text, and not an image. Secondly, when considering the use of publisher-provided materials, ask for sample content and use the "copy and paste" test to assess the material.