Creating accessible communications

Think of accessibility like spelling and grammar. It should be a part of your process from the start. Building it in early makes your content more inclusive, professional and easier to understand.

People with a wide range of circumstances benefit from accessible information, including those who:

• Have vision or hearing impairments
• Have mobility impairments
• Experience learning difficulties
• Speak/read English as a second language
• Use mobile phones or other small displays
• Have slow internet connections
• Can't use video or audio content

Our Inclusive Design for Canvas course outlines some of the minimum essentials to create an inclusive, accessible Canvas course. These essentials include headings, tables, alt text, images and links.  Additionally, this Canvas course offers information on how you can test for accessibility and further readings about inclusive design and accessibility standards.

Adopting an inclusive, accessible approach will improve the experience of all your students and ensure consistency across the University. 

Go to Inclusive design for Canvas.

Fonts

• Use Arial or other strong sans serif font. Do not use ornate fonts.
• Minimum font size is 12pt for print and 18pt for Powerpoint. While digital documents can usually be enlarged, avoid close line-spacing.
• Avoid using italics, block capitals and underlining.
• Use bold text to emphasise text without reducing readability.
• Embed hyperlinks into sentences that include meaningful information –avoid the use of “click here” or “read more”.

Headings

• Use heading styles to format Microsoft Word documents and web pages rather than bolding text.

Layout

• Use good colour contrast. You can check your colours with Colour Contrast Analyser. Vision Australia has also written a full explanation on How to Use the Colour Contrast Analyser.
• Left align text.
• Use a vertical line to indicate separate columns.

Tables

First, ask the question is it really a table or a list? If it really is a table:

1. Avoid using merged cells.
2. Avoid using blank rows and columns.
3. Consider reading order of tables.
4. Add bookmarks for table headers.

Images

• All images in documents and webpages require alternate (descriptive) text, unless they're decorative.
• Include text descriptions for graphs and diagrams.
• Do not use text boxes in Microsoft Word.
• Do not use scanned files.

Video content

• Include closed captions and/or transcripts.
• For recorded video content, review auto-generated captions for accuracy.

For more detail about how to make your content accessible, check out Making Accessible documents and websites: New Zealand Blind Foundation.