Additional Support and Disability Advice Centre

Transcription

1 Additional Support and Disability Advice Centre GUIDELINES TO PRODUCING ACCESSIBLE WORD DOCUMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION As well as allowing adaptation of font, background colour and layout to suit personal preferences, providing electronic copies of course materials is a critical first step towards ensuring that such material can be accessed through assistive software that can provide screen magnification, text to speech facilities or conversion to Braille. However, functionality can be reduced if the basic layout and approach towards the production of the presentation compromises easy access or effective use of that software. This guide aims to provide some pointers towards maximising the effectiveness of providing electronic alternatives through ensuring that no unnecessary barriers to access by disabled students are present. 2 USE STYLES - THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE 2.1 Styles are a Microsoft Word tool that enables quick formatting to a pre defined specification. These cover Heading Styles for titles or sub titles, Normal for your body text, Index Styles, Table of Contents Styles, List Styles and are all available in the Normal template. If you use these Styles, a Word document will be clear to read, translate into quite reasonably formatted Braille and will be easily accessed by screen readers. This is because the heading is given an invisible tag that tells the screen reader what it is and where it is positioned within your document. 2.2 In customising a Style to create an accessible document, although you will have to change the font, size or emphasis of a heading, you only need to change the Style once - your changes can then be applied to any text in the document. (See 7: Creating New Styles in Word). It should be noted that font size 12 would be a minimum for the normal text style. 3 BASIC ACCESSIBILITY 3.1 Resist the temptation to over-elaborate and keep your document plain, elegant and readable. Concentrate on content rather than looks. Keep to a single topic per paragraph, and resist the temptation to fill your document with fancy fonts, size changes, orientation changes and colours. It will make it more difficult for your readers to understand, and it will be lost on the Braille/audio users. You can actually make a very attractive document using three Heading Styles and the Normal Style - this allows you four fonts and four colours, one for each Style. 3.2 Text size and font preference varies from person to person and, when possible, direct enquiry of the individual concerned is always best. Arial font sizes cover the most commonly encountered preferences with Arial bold font size 24 approaching the realistic upper limit, beyond which audio or Braille alternatives probably need to be considered. Updated: 10/06/14 Page 1 of 6

2 4 DO NOT 4.1 mistake pictures of text as real text WordArt does not translate into audio or Braille, even if it looks colourful on the printed page. 4.2 confuse the Header style with Heading styles A Header Style is used for the document header. This is a piece of text that is repeated at the top of every page, also known as a running header not to be confused with a heading within the document. For document, chapter and paragraph headings, you need a Heading Style. 4.3 just format a piece of text - format the whole style If you think you need a sub-heading, apply one of the lesser heading Styles; don't just embolden and change the font size when you're using Normal Style. That said, bold, underline and italics are fine for emphasis within a paragraph and will be translated into the correct Braille code to emphasise the text, although they will, of course, be lost on audio conversion. 4.4 make repeated use of the Enter key to force a new page The best way to begin the next part of your text on a new page is to enter a hard page break by pressing Control + Enter. If you have already have page breaks created through columns of paragraph marks they can be viewed using the Show Hide button, deleted, and replaced with Control + Enter. You will then see a nice clean page break: Page Break DO YOU REALLY NEED 5.1 that image? If you need to use images, diagrams, plots and graphs make sure that they are labelled. For Braille users you will have to make sure that the image is saved into a separate file for rendering as a graphic, and ensure that there is a note in the body of the text to alert the Braille reader to the graphic and its relevance. This can also be useful to the vision impaired, keeping all graphics in an appendix. You can add a note to an image easily by putting a descriptive line immediately beneath it - this should contain a Figure number that the Braille or vision impaired reader can use to refer to the corresponding tactile graphic or appendix: Example: Figure 1: A picture of the alignment buttons on the Word toolbar. Updated: 10/06/14 Page 2 of 6

3 5.2 that table? Is a table really the only way to represent this information? They can be a convenient way to present a lot of data, but a very complex table, or one with a lot of columns can be impossible to render in Braille and difficult for a screen reader to follow. Try increasing your font size to 22, and see how much of your table is visible. If your table is too complex, can you split the information in some way? Can it be rendered in text instead? Be careful also that you don't embed images into your tables; the information in them is lost to the Braille/screen reader. It may be better to put it in the appendix. (so is this) This is text 5.3 that Text Box? If you are using a text box to position text on the page, remember that you can do this with indent which can be just as effective and will not create problems for the Braille transcriber. If you are using the Text Box to mix graphics and text, you are actually making an image. How will the Braille/screen reader access this information? Can it be rendered as a tactile diagram? Make sure your Text Box is placed in the proper place in the text so that the information flows smoothly, and use some extra text to describe any graphical content. You can include the descriptive text inside the Text Box, or - if you have to put the original Text Box out of sequence - you can use another Text Box to refer to it by Figure number. Test your document using a screen reader such as Texthelp Read & Write. Enlarge the text to 20pt. How does it look? Does it still flow? Updated: 10/06/14 Page 3 of 6

4 6 CONTENTS LISTS IN WORD 6.1 Headings as hyperlinks Producing a contents list when you have completed your document makes finding specific locations within the document very easy as, not only does the list give page numbers and the order of information contained, but each heading within the list also acts as a hyperlink to the relevant page in the document. 6.2 Creating a table of contents a) Place cursor where you want your table of contents to appear b) Click References tab c) Click Table of Contents d) Click Automatic Table e) f) Should you change your document after creating a contents list, simply click the References tab again and click the Update Table icon (immediately to the right of the Table of Contents icon). Updated: 10/06/14 Page 4 of 6

5 7 CREATING NEW STYLES IN WORD New Styles have to be based on the standard Styles already in Word so, as example, if you wanted all your page headings to be Arial 16 bold you would need to base this on an existing heading style such as Heading 1 as described in 7.1 below. This will now look as required but carry the Heading 1 tags for a screen reader. It would be advisable to decide on a format style and stick to it e.g. Heading 1 for first level headings (chapter or article headings), Heading 2 for second level sub-headings etc. Try not to over-use these - three heading styles to a page would be appropriate. 7.1 Creating a new style a) With a new document open in word b) Click the Styles Dialog Box Launcher c) Click the New Style button Updated: 10/06/14 Page 5 of 6

6 Type new style name Select a heading style Select the format options d) Click New documents based on this template if you don t do this it will only apply the new style to the current document. e) This Style will now appear in the Quick Style menu. f) Finally, type your document, highlight each piece of text you wish to become the heading, and then click on the appropriate Quick Style icon. Updated: 10/06/14 Page 6 of 6