 Creating Accessible Documents. Cheryl Bergstahler, Accessible Technology Director, University of Washington. I'm Cheryl Bergstahler at the University of Washington in Seattle. We, on our campus, like other campuses, produce tons of documents to share with our students. Copies of PowerPoint presentations, of journal articles, of book chapters, you name it. It can be a massive amount of reading for any student. It's even more of a challenge for students with disabilities. Papers emerge from a printer. Jarell Thompson, Accessible Technology Manager, University of Washington. Everybody creates documents and most people don't realize that all documents are not equal. That some are more accessible than others. Students who are blind use screen readers and speech synthesis to read the content allowed to them that appears on the screen. Students with dyslexia and other conditions that impact their reading, they use screen readers too. Even though they can see the content on the screen, the voice output helps them comprehend that content. But Assistive Technology benefits many other students as well. The most inaccessible documents are scanned in or photocopied. Because they're essentially images, screen readers can't access the text. A scanner, accompanied by optical character recognition or OCR, can turn a document into one that is accessible to a screen reader. It also benefits other students. For instance, somebody using a mobile device to access the content. Or someone who wants to search through the content to find the content that they're interested in. In order for a document to be accessible to a person who's blind and using a screen reader, it's important that the heading structure be used. For example, in Microsoft Word, you should use the heading styles. Headings serve a couple of important functions for a screen reader user. One is that they can navigate through a document by its headings. So they can jump from heading to heading to heading. And their Assistive Technology will inform them that they're on a heading of a particular level. So they know this is a heading level two. That then is a subheading underneath a heading level one. And so that helps them to develop a kind of a mental outline of the structure of the document. Hadi Rangan, I.D. Accessibility Specialist, University of Washington. For a few seconds, you skim through the document. You just want to know that what is in this document, it is built. What are the major components of this article that you are reading? This helps you to focus on the desired section that you would like to study further. Without that, you have to read from top to bottom because everything has the same weight. It's easier to build an accessibility when a document is being created than waiting until after the fact. And if you build an accessibility, it will diminish the need for accommodations for students with disabilities. For more information about IT accessibility, consult uw.edu.accessibility. This video presentation was created with funding from UW Information Technology. Copyright 2021, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.