How to format MS Word documents for ADA Accessible compliance requirements. ADA = Americans with Disabilities Act. This law was applied to electronic documents in 2010, and yet today, millions of businesses with public documents are at risk of liability for simply not knowing what formats to apply to their documents.
- Students should be comfortable with MS Word, and this course will teach the intermediate skills needed to get the work done
- Students do not need to know anything about the ADA law, it will be reviewed in the lesson videos as needed
- Getting Started by Setting up the MS Word Screen Elements
- Working with Text formats for ADA Accessibility
- Working with Styles to Expedite Formatting
- Working with Objects and Visuals
- Advanced ADA Accessible MS Word Features
- Finalizing the Document
Turn on the important screen elements that will assist in staying organized during a long document process.
MS Word is becoming ADA friendly with the "Ease of Access" features that you will turn on in the background of the program
These two buttons are handy to check progress on readability while you apply formats throughout the document.
Hyperlink text must be formatted specifically to help the blind person. This lesson teaches the 3 steps to ADA Accessibility for hyperlink text.
Low vision readers have difficulty with some text styles and color contrast. This video lesson teaches the guidelines to make sure your text is compatible to ADA law.
Sighted readers take for granted the ease of viewing a signature line: ___________.
But blind readers hear the words "Underscore Underscore Underscore" and it's incredibly distracting.
In this lesson, you will learn how to format an underscore to help your blind readers..
Learn how to create a speedy Text Style to replace multi-step text formats.
Headings create Structure, and that structure assists the screen reader programs for proper readability alignment. This lesson will help you manage your long MS Word documents.
Screen Readers identify visuals by the background text embedded. This lesson teaches you how to apply Alternative Text to your photos and objects in a MS Word document.
This is one of the best kept secrets and can be found in all of Microsoft's products. Learn how to see all of your objects, per page, on one single panel.
Without the proper layout, a screen reader will place the picture in a random spot, possibly distorting your message and definitely confusing your blind reader. Learn which picture layout is the one that works every time.
This is a lesson that wraps up most of the previous items and is a guide in your process of ADA Accessible documents.
Tables are a common feature in Word documents, but did you know that a screen reader needs them to be as simple as possible? This lesson reviews the Table structure for your Accessible document.
In this lesson you will learn how to view Closed Captions to your videos for the hearing impaired, and how to get those captions onto your own videos.
Document Properties are the metadata that travel with your document, and the information used by a screen reader program to find your document online if and when it gets uploaded to the world.
The built-in Accessibility Checker of MS Word will display any potential problems before you finalize your document. Learn how to find and correct those errors in this lesson.
It may seem unusual, but saving your Word document as PDF allows a very important step in the process to confirm that screen readers will be able to read your document to a blind person as you intended. This is the 1st of 3 steps in this process.
Tags are the numbers that show the readability alignment in PDF format. But to quickly fix major issues, a jump back into Word is the Super Secret you will learn in this lesson.
After you view the tags and fix potential issues with the previous lesson's Super Secret, you may still have to touch up any leftover problems. Do both the PDF and the Word files at the same time. See how and why in this lesson.
Please download the resource files for this lecture.
We've put together a checklist to help make sure you don't skip a step! It's a hard process to remember all the steps! Hopefully this course helped shed some light for you. Thank you!