About Accessibility

How to make Accessible Microsoft Word documents

Objective:

Access – ability is the boom of the industry. With its newest inventions and researches, it is one of the upcoming criteria that is to be taken care of when deploying documents on the web. For sure, the use of accessible documents is more popular and easy. To be a part of the accessible world all the documents be it PDF or MS s care is taken all the way. To convert accessible Microsoft word documents to PDF please refer to Microsoft Word to PDF conversion.

This article deals with complete training on successfully building accessible Microsoft s.

The simplest way to build accessibility into documents is to make a list of checkpoints and follow it. To start with we make a list for our MS s. The points in the checklist are the objectives of the article. After reading the article you should be able to know and use

1. Style sheets – to have a similar look of the documents.
2. Images – to have the alternate text present for all images
3. Tables – to have proper labeling of the tables, row and column headers.
4. Hyperlinks – to navigate smoothly throughout the document.

STYLE SHEETS:

Style sheets as the name suggests are used to create documents that have a similar structure. In addition to providing a similar structure throughout the document these are also used to help making of documents easier. Structural formatting is an essential element when it comes to building of accessible digital content that is available on the web for the general people. This is a way to reach out to the people with disabilities. The formatting that provides a structure to the entire document allows readers to read, recognize and identify content.

Accessibility is usually designed into documents in a sense to help spread the content to the people using assistive technology devices at different levels. Having a solid structure in the document helps smooth navigation, while also recognizing the different heading levels and page layout making an image altogether. Structured s are also the favorites of the search engines. These documents are easier and less error prone while converting them to other formats for the web usage.

The Styles features offered within Word allows users to be creative and at the same time reduce their efforts for selecting, highlighting and formatting each element separately. Surely, these styles can be customized and used according to the type of article you have in mind, thus providing a different feel to every article that you write. Users discover that using Styles has additional benefits. A document’s font, size, bold and/or other characteristics of the document’s body text and headings can be changed quickly by modifying the style.

Applying styles

The structured of any accessible document should be hierarchical. The different levels of headings found should be nested and should follow the universal law that the highest is used first. For example, Lower label headings should be a part of the higher label headings. So the heading 1 text can contain of many headings of label 2. Styles are prioritized for the ease of navigation that follows good presentation and formatting of documents. There are other elements in the style sheet which you will learn while using the style sheets.

Applying Styles

• Start your document with the title or the Heading of the page.
• Click the HOME tab.
• Once in the HOME tab, click on the icon below the Change styles section.
• A style sheet opens.
• Highlight the text you want to style.
• Select the appropriate style from the style sheet.
• The text gets formatted to the style settings previously stored.

Customize Styles

When it comes to building new styles or modifying the ones already present in the style sheets, the process is rather simple.  When you make changes to an element in your document and want to update the existing style follow these steps. You can modify the default styles in every aspect that you want. From fonts to the spacing all can be tailored to your interests.

Customize Styles

• Make changes and Save as a new style by clicking on the drop down button which opens asave as a new style window.
• Highlight the text that you want to change or have changed.
• As you highlight the text, the style that pertains to that text gets selected in the style sheet.
• Go to the style and right click on it.
• The modify styles window opens with several options.
• You can select the option that says update to match selection (if you have already made changes) or you can select the modify option that opens another window to help you modify the highlighted text.
• You can also use the paragraph option to manage spacing options.

Also you can (Look Images Below)

modify-style-word



paragraph-edit-word

IMAGES:

Visual content is an essential component of accessible web pages. But it is only useful if the images are accessible. A simple process produces accessible images that can be read by assistive technology for people with disabilities and thus contribute in understanding the content of the web page. These images should also be accessible because they are used when a web page fails to load an image.

Creating images with alt text

Alternate text or commonly known as “ALT text” is used to make an image recognizable by th

e different assistive technology devices used today.

To create Images with Alt text and videos with proper captioning is the standard in the world of the web.

• Select the Insert tab and then click on the picture icon.
• A new dialog box is opened that lets you select the picture you want to insert.
• Once the picture is inserted, right click on it.
• This opens a window with many options.
• For Microsoft Word 2003 click on the format picture option.
• For Microsoft Word 2007 click on the size or size and position option.
• This opens a size dialog box that has a separate tab for alt text.
• Click this alt text tab to open a window to enter the alt text.
• Enter the appropriate alt text and select ok to close the dialog box.
• This alt text however, will not be visible in the word document.

How to add an alternate text to an image

Creating images with a caption

• Select the Insert tab and then click on the picture icon.
• A new dialog box is opened that lets you select the picture you want to insert.
• Next right click the image to open the window again.
• This opens a window with many options.
• Select the Insert caption option which opens a new window.
• Enter the caption most appropriately suited to the image.
• Select ok to close the dialog box.
• The caption is inserted.

TABLES:

Till date tables are the best approach applied when large amounts of data have to be presented. Viewing data in table format reduces its complexity and looks appealing. These tables however, have to be made accessible so that they can be viewed and navigated.

How to insert table into a word document

Creating Tables with headers

• Select the Insert tab and then click on the table icon to insert a table into your word document.
• You have multiple options to follow.
• You can insert, draw a new table or use any of the sample tables.

How to repeat table headers for a table

• If you select the insert option, the dialog window opens which lets you select the number of rows and columns for your table.
• Enter the text headings of the columns of the tables.
• Select the layout tab and select repeat headers options.
• This helps when tables are divided into different pages.

HYPERLINKS:

Hyperlinks are the best possible navigation means that are used all round the industry to create smooth navigational flow. These links can be within the document, or another document in the same web site or to a different web site altogether.

Creating Links

Some people think that including hyperlinks within a document, makes the document ugly. However, the hyperlinks should always be replaced with text. Doing this helps to identify and defines the nature of the link thus increasing the knowledge the user has about the link. It is always a better approach to replace the long URL.

How to insert a link into a word document

• Include the text that you want the users to read inside your text document
• Highlight this text to be hyperlinked.
• Click on the Insert Tab.
• Click on Hyperlink. The Insert Hyperlink dialog window will open.
• The highlighted text is displayed within the Text to display text box. By default the hyperlink function for Existing File or Web Page button is selected in the left column.
• Select the location of the electronic document to be linked; Existing File or Web Page, Place in This Document, Create New Document, E-mail Address.
• If the link is to an Internet resource, type / paste the URL in the Address text box.
• Click OK to close the dialog box.

To convert this accessible Microsoft word document into PDF please refer to Microsoft Word to PDF conversion.