Digital accessibility is essential for all people to have access to digital content, and it is also now the law. Some accessibility remediation requires expertise and time, but there are many tasks you can do quickly to dramatically improve the accessibility of your digital content. All of the tasks on this page can be completed in just a few minutes. If you get stuck and find that you need more support than what is provided here, reach out to CTL at umpi-ctl@maine.edu or submit a Digital Accessibility Support Request.

OCR & Auto-Tag a File

When scanning in a file using a scanner or copy machine, the resulting file is often an image with the text inaccessible to a screen reader. Optical character recognition (OCR) is a technology tool that scans images to recognize patterns that look like text and save this in the metadata. However, a screen reader still will not be able to make sense of the file until the sections of text are labeled by type. Adobe Acrobat Pro can automatically tag PDF files for you.

OCR Text in Adobe Acrobat Pro
How to tag PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro

Set up Document Structures with Headings

Tags describe the organization of file content and should be labeled accurately. Headings are tags that are used to identify the hierarchy of content within a file. There are six levels of headings and there should only be one item labeled with Heading 1, typically the page title. Headings should be nested appropriately with major sections of a file labeled with Heading 2, sub-sections within each of those labeled Heading 3, etc. Default heading styles can be formatted according to your preference.

Update and Apply Styles to Document Sections in Microsoft Word

Add Alternative Text to Multimedia

Many users are not able to see images on a screen, such as those with a visual impairment or those who have images turned off due to low bandwidth. It is important to describe images with text so that these users understand what is being displayed to others. Other images that are not essential to understand the content of a file can be marked as decorative so screen readers ignore them.

Add complex alt text with Gem Alt Text generator: This tutorial shows you how to add alternate text to a figure in a pdf file using Adobe Acrobat Pro. To generate the alternate text, you can use a tool like the Gem Alt Text generator.

Add Metadata to a File Like the Language and Title

There is some data behind the scenes that screen readers need in order to access the content, such as the title of the file and the primary language.

Edit Captions/Transcripts on Video and Audio Files

All video and audio files that convey information via hearing should have a text equivalent for someone who is hearing impaired. There are tools for auto-captioning multimedia, like Kaltura and YouTube, but they are often inaccurate. In addition to the captions overlaying the video in real-time, you should also provide a text transcript of the whole recording.

Format Tables for Accessibility

Some content is important to organize in the format of a table, especially data that has been categorized. However, these can be difficult for screen reader users to understand as the content of a table is read in one long stream of text. Table headers and simple table layout are essential for helping users to understand the content of a table. A short summary of the table in a caption will help all users to understand the purpose of the data.

Create accessible tables in Microsoft Word: This short tutorial shows you how to remediate tables in Microsoft Word to make them accessible, such as designating a header row, merging split cells, and splitting merged cells.

Modify Reading Order

Screen readers may not read the content of a file in the order that you intended. Typically, reading order is saved in the metadata in the order that the item was added to the page. You can manually adjust the reading order of content in a file.

Ensure Color Contrast

Text that is too close in color to the background can be illegible or cause eye strain. The ideal foreground to background color contrast is 4.5:1.

Create Descriptive Links

Avoid using full URLs in your text content and instead use the link tool to add the URL in the metadata behind descriptive text. The link text should be descriptive, not just “click here” to allow a screen reader user to quickly scan through the links in a file to find the one they need.