Accessible Course Handouts

National Center on Disability and Access to Education

Documents, such as PDF's and Word documents, must be accessible to people with disabilities. The National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE) provides many useful cheatsheets Links to an external site. for creating accessible content. See the two NCDAE tutorials below for very important instructions about sharing course handouts with accessibility in mind.

Creating Accessible Word Documents

A few simple tools in Microsoft Word can assist you in increasing accessibility. This five minute video is a summary of those tools. We recommend you watch this video before creating word documents you intend to upload to Canvas. 

Tip: want to share your accessible Word document as an accessible PDF?
See this NCDAE cheatsheet Links to an external site. for instructions.

Creating Accessible PDF's

Have you inherited PDF's from another instructor, but you're unsure if it's accessible for your students? Adobe Acrobat has tools to help ensure all students in your course can read the document, including text, charts and images. This five minute video shows how:

Tip: see the NCDEA cheatsheet page Links to an external site. with written instructions from this video.