What advice can you provide for all staff producing word documents to make sure that they are more accessible to those reading them?

One really important thing you can do when authoring word documents is use the heading styles. In your document, don’t just embolden the words you want to use as headings, instead use the in- built heading structures.

This in turn allows a reader to read a summary of all your headings and sub headings within your word document using the document map. To read a document using the document map, click on view > document map. Your word document will produce a summary of all headings at the left hand side of the page.

The ability to navigate document headings will benefit all users but give exceptional benefits to a range of disabled people. For example:

• Users with visual impairments may rely on a screen magnifier for reading. A long document can be very awkward to navigate through a screen magnifier, requiring much horizontal as well as vertical scrolling.


• A print impaired user can rapidly focus on the key concepts within the text without having to negotiate large volumes of text.


• People with poorer English skills (for example, British Sign Language users or others for whom English is a second language) can extract the key concepts before negotiating the dense text.


• A motor impaired user can access the whole document with minimal keyboard or mouse movement.


• Users with learning difficulties can identify the main ideas of a lengthy document at a glance.

To learn more about structuring your documents and how to view them more accessibly have a look at the TechDis Accessibility Essentials. You might find the flash audio visual animations particularly helpful in explaining this for you.