Accessibility Best Practices for All Digital Content

There are some fundamental formatting techniques that are simple to do and make a huge difference for your audience to make any document more accessible.  This includes Word, Google Docs, PDF's, and documents created in Canvas. Creating accessible digital content that can be used by all is the responsibility of everyone who creates digital content at Rutgers. 

Top Five Core Skills to Make Documents Accessible

The following are considered the top five formatting techniques to make your documents more accessible. Focusing on these five core skills will enable you to create content that helps cultivate a more accessible digital environment. There are many others, but adding these will increase accessibility greatly.  

Learning these skills is quick and applying them to all of your digital content addresses several of the most common accessibility issues that people with disabilities encounter. If you haven’t previously considered accessibility when designing your digital content, start small and build from there.  

Once you've learned these Five Core Skills, go to the Document Formatting section at the bottom of this page to learn more!

Open the headings below to learn about the five core skills

Headings in a document 

• Make it look well-organized
• Gives an at-a-glance view of the topics covered
• Helps people navigate to various sections easily
• Auto-generates a table of contents  

Using Bulleted or Numbered Styles 

• Makes it easier to read and skim a document.
• Ensures consistent understanding across platforms.
• Helps screen reader users understand the content structure and organization.

Meaningful Hyperlinks

• Hyperlinks are a great way to connect your audience with additional resources and tools. 
• Inserting a full URL into your content can be challenging for screen reader users
• Full URL's are also very unsightly to non-screener users.
• Provides a better user experience for those with and without disabilities. 

Alternative Text for Images

• Allows people who are blind or have low vision to understand the content of images and other visual objects.
• Screen readers (e.g., JAWS or Voice Over) reads the alt text aloud, which helps users understand the image's context. 
• Helps users who may not understand the meaning of the visual content using words instead of images. 
• Allows people with slow internet connections to access the content of the image in words when the image may not be visible. 
• Content that needs alt text includes: Pictures, Clip Art, Charts, Tables, Graphics.

Color and Color Contrast

• Assists people with color blindness who cannot distinguish certain colors from others.
• Assists people with low vision who may have limited or no color perception or need to magnify a screen or invert the colors to read.
• Assists people who have low contrast sensitivity due to age or other medical conditions.
• Assists everyone because high contrast makes content easier to read.