Your Accessibility Checklist
Use the checklist in the accordion below to check your own learning and teaching materials for common accessibility issues.
Things to consider when you are creating documents.
Pro Tip: Once you have created an accessible document, you can then save a PDF copy of documents to easily create multiple formats for your resources.
Note: you must use save to PDF, and not Print to PDF. The Print to PDF option only makes what amounts to an image. Saving to PDF, keeps your formatting though in some cases may change some fonts and spacing.
Things to consider when you are creating presentations.
Pro Tip: Run the Accessibility Checker on PowerPoint to view suggested ways to create accessible presentations.
Things to consider when you are inserting multimedia.
Pro Tip: If you are a member of staff: Use your Brookes Panopto account to add closed-captions automatically for all uploaded audio and visual files.
Things to consider when you are adding resources to the VLE.
Pro Tip: Use GoogleDocs or Panopto to insert a link (using a descriptive name like ‘AccessibilityVideo’) or embed your presentations and videos directly in Moodle.
Congratulations!
By completing this checklist you have met the minimum guidelines for creating
accessible resources that all your students can see, use, and understand.
Do refer back to this checklist regularly if you need the reminder, or would like to try out another ‘pro-tip’.
Glossary of Key Terms
Need help with the language? You’re not alone. Check out our list of frequently requested definitions.
- Styles: Styles indicate the different ways that text is rendered on a screen. Screenreaders and other softwares use these styles to indicate when text has been marked as ‘bold’ or as a ‘Title’ or ‘Heading’.
- Section Headings: There are several levels of headings that are used as built-in styles for various word processing programs. These operate like an outline with Heading 1 followed by Heading 2, and so forth.
- High Contrast: A high contrast between colours makes certain that there is a clear difference between the text colour and the background colours. For example: Do not use White Text on a Light Grey background as that would be harder to read.
- Alt-Text: Alternative text or ‘alt-text’ is the text that is read by screen readers or that is shown in place of an image. All text on an image should be included in the alt-text. Likewise a full description of the image should be included.
- Descriptive Full Name: A descriptive full-name should indicate what the resource is and what information it contains.
- Embed: When you embed a video or other file into a website that resource is automatically shown without clicking on a link. This is most commonly used for embedded videos.
Your Tutorial
This guided tour of the Accessibility Checklist includes curated support resources to help you build more accessible resources.