Universal Design and Paperwork, vol. 2
Accessible digital documents and other fantastic beasts: where to find them.
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A mere week ago, I shared a paper with my PhD supervisors: a lengthy, verbose Word document, spiced up with hand-drawn doodles and schemes to help untangle my chaotic thinking. While some of them were decorative, others were critical to understanding my poor takes on local knowledge and participatory design.
Later that day, I opened the document on my phone, trying to find a particular bit, only to discover that on small screens, all visual materials in my otherwise gorgeous document turn into pumpkins.
In this issue of “The Accessibility Apprentice”, we will talk about accessibility in digital documents. Buckle up.
Thou shalt check your documents
In 1631, London printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas released an edition of the Bible, which would go down in history as the Wicked Bible.
Barker, who had previously released a rather controversial first edition of the King James Bible, made a small but significant mistake: the word "not" was omitted from the sentence, "Thou shalt not commit adultery".
Barker and Lucas were fined (fine later quashed), lost their printing licence, and the Bibles were recalled and destroyed (very few copies survived the purge). George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was infuriated:
I knew the tyme when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the beste, but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned.
It would have been naive, however, to presume that the “scribes of the old” were somehow more attentive in their work: as Bart Ehrman highlights in his blog, “the earliest copies we have are the worst, when it comes to accidental mistakes”. To be fair, the standards of the 17th century were so high, the Archbishop of Canterbury was right to be angry at the printers: their lack of attention to detail was scandalous and could have led to serious consequences.
Spell-checking remains a critical component of writing and publishing texts to this day: so much so, it has been integrated into almost every digital product (sometimes doing more harm than good). It’s hard to imagine emailing an important document without fixing every misspelled word first.
Why aren’t we doing the same for accessibility?
What makes a document accessible?
Its ability to convey the message in its entirety to any and all readers.
Digital documents are flexible and fluid: they transform, change, and move around, and in the hyperconnected world, there is no way to control or even predict where and how they would appear to the viewer. Ultrawide screens, mobile view, print, dark mode, large system font size: there is a plethora of variables at play, each altering the initial document, and it is critical to ensure that integral parts of the message are not lost in translation.
Accessible documents are those that ensure the integrity of their content, whilst allowing the reader to control and tailor their appearance.
Are you writing a text?
Creating accessible text documents is a fairly straightforward job: write a good text, double-check the headings, and throw in a summary if necessary. Colour-contrast and font size go without saying, of course.
Here’s a handy guide you may wish to bookmark for your next writing endeavour:
Pasting an image?
Try to avoid relying on images to convey critical information.
If, for whatever reason, you wish to break this rule, think of an alternative way to communicate the message. Each image needs to have an alternative text (except decorative ones), but what if you could go even further and translate the content of the image into text?
Nature, for instance, recommends its authors to avoid unnecessary details, reduce complexity, and provide any text “in the legend rather than on the figure itself”.
Working on a PPT?
Unlike text documents, presentations are not read sequentially, feature plenty of creative materials, and need a lot of love and attention. Colour contrast, reading order, closed captions: depending on the type of materials you use in your presentation, the requirements may vary.
Here is a fantastically detailed guide that will help you create accessible PowerPoint documents.
The curse of the Wicked Documents
Wicked Documents, much like the Wicked Bible, always miss something seemingly innocuous: a misplaced heading, an absent alternative text, a black company logo on a transparent background.
Then, someone pulls the outline and attempts to navigate the document, only to skip an entire section, all thanks to a single missing heading. They may be using a screen reader or simply be on the run: either way, the message from the Wicked Document will not reach them.
They might open a document on their phone, only for the Dark Mode to virtually render every black PNG that looked so sharp on white invisible. Images and graphs, like a band of mutes, will not be able to tell their secrets, squeezed into tiny rectangles or worse, failed to load from a remote server.
Wicked Documents end up hiding the information or, worse, confusing and misleading the reader. Sadly, there is no Archbishop of Canterbury to chastise their authors.
What do I do?
Trust, verify, learn.
First, let the machine do its job. Your word processor and sheet manager are most likely equipped with accessibility checkers. Microsoft, for instance, added an automated Accessibility Checker to Word in 2010. Although it cannot detect every possible problem with your documents, it is good enough to highlight some of the issues.
That being said, do not trust the machine to do everything for you. Educate yourself: it is not enough to remember a handful of requirements. It is critical to understand why they are needed in the first place.