Accessible Document and Media Production
What to know
Electronic documents (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, spreadsheets) and media (audio, video) must be authored accessibly. In Word/PowerPoint: use built-in heading styles, real lists, alt text on images, table headers, unique slide titles, and reading-order checks. In PDF: the file must be tagged, with a logical reading order, alt text, bookmarks, and correct language. Scanned PDFs need OCR before tagging. In spreadsheets: name sheets, avoid merged cells, and define header rows.
For media: captions (synchronized), transcripts, audio description for visual-only content, and sign language interpretation where appropriate. Caption quality matters - auto-captions are a starting point, not a finished product. For audio-only content, provide a transcript.
Traps
- Assuming a PDF exported from Word is automatically accessible; export preserves tags only if the source was structured.
- Treating alt text as optional for decorative images; decorative images need empty alt (
alt=""). - Forgetting that tables need header associations (
<th scope>), not just bold text. - Confusing captions (for Deaf/hard-of-hearing users) with audio description (for blind/low-vision users).
Rule of thumb
Author for structure first, then export. If the source document is unstructured, the PDF will be too. Run a PDF accessibility check and verify reading order manually.
Worked example
A scanned policy PDF has no tags. Steps: run OCR, add tags, set reading order, add alt text and bookmarks, set document language, then verify with a screen reader and the PDF checker.