New: Accessible Document Design Best Practices Guide

Hi all,I’m emailing to share a resource we created at Communication Design Quarterly that is likely relevant to many people on this listserv: A best-practices guide to accessible document design. I co-wrote this guide with Hannah Taylor, and it focuses on various things people can do to make your documents more accessible for a larger number of readers. The guide covers various topics, including

  • designing documents to work well with screen readers
  • writing high quality alt text
  • formatting hyperlinks to make them accessible to people who use screen readers
  • running accessibility image checks
  • tagging content for accessibility in PDFs
  • running accessibility checkers

By no means is this guide comprehensive, but we hope people find it valuable. Accessible document design is way more complex than most people realize (certainly more complex than I realized), so we created this document as a starting point for people who want to learn more about the topic. Accessibility should be centered in everything we do, so we hope this guide helps us all learn a bit more about how to make the documents we produce more accessible.

Feel free to share widely, and don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have feedback or thoughts or anything at all really :).

Best,

Jordan Frith, Ph.D.

Pearce Professor of Professional Communication

Clemson University

Pronouns: He/Him

Editor-in-Chief, Communication Design Quarterly

Editor, The X-Series, Parlor Press

My Google Scholar Profile

My personal website