Accessibility Guidelines

Tips for creating accessible teaching and learning materials.

The University’s accessibility webpage presents the guidelines, policy and legislation on accessibility. Below are a few tips to assist with ensuring teaching and learning materials meet accessibility standards.

Blackboard Learn and accessibility

10 accessibility tips

1. Use heading styles, use a nested hierarchy in documents and web pages, and create bookmarks and document structure tags when creating PDFs.
2. Use descriptive hyperlinks to direct your audience to other content instead of web address links (don’t use ‘click here’).
3. Add Alternative Text to images to help those who use screen readers (and if an image is purely decorative, use Alt=””). Do this in Word and PowerPoint documents as well as web pages.
4. Break up walls of text. Use formatting and a navigation
5. To add emphasis, use italics, don’t underline text as this often signifies a link.
6. Think about people with shade-blindness and colour-blindness, and use contrast and patterns to convey meaning and colour. Avoid using red, green and pink to convey information. Print colour items in black and white to see how the contrast works.
7. Include captions, transcripts and/or audio descriptions in multimedia if possible.
8. Use Left Justified paragraphs and increase your margins to reduce text blocks’ width to improve readability.
9. Run the ‘Check Accessibility’ tool on your Microsoft Office files – it will highlight areas for improvement.