10 quick and easy steps to inclusive practice with digital documents.
Avoid
- Text in capital letters
- Text in italics
- Underlining text (except for hyperlinks where it’s a convention)
- Right, Centre and Full Justification
- Patterned backgrounds
- Poor colour contrast
- Text over images
- Fancy fonts
- Text less than 12 pt in size
- PDF with no alternative version (eg Word, rtf, html etc)
Finally, Section 20 of the Single Equality Act, ‘Duty to make adjustments’ (page 24 of the act) expressly references the provision of information in accessible formats. The EQU guide to implications of this act for higher education uses the example of providing lecture hand outs only in paper format where a reasonable adjustment would be to provide lecture notes in alternative formats such as on a virtual learning environment. Students can then access them independently and, designing them with the 10 steps above in mind, should help ensure they are accessible.