Accessible Documents

Accessibility of off-line documents

Many organisations use their website as the main channel for publishing and sharing documents and information. It is important to ensure people know what they are downloading and that the content is usable and accessible. This similarly applies to documents emailed to members of the public.

When publishing documents to the web, consider the format which is the easiest to read. Documents such as Microsoft Word and PDFs can be made accessible. However, this does not happen automatically, and care should be taken to ensure that accessibility is considered in all stages of the documents development.

To start with, all downloadable documents should have a summary provided in HTML, as well as details on the document’s format and file size.