"Fast Five" Essentials to Preparing Materials

Most employees and students can take advantage of these tools in order to create materials for all constituents—employees, alumni, and students—to work and learn with confidence.

Table of Contents

Select the link to be taken directly to that section of the article.

1 In-program Styles
2 Convey Meaning with Words
3 In-program Accessibility Checkers
4 Captioning
5 Setting a Language
6 Additional Resources

In-program Styles

Using appropriate headings in the appropriate order in your current program is necessary. They add structure and create consistency in documents and allow screen readers to easily—audibly—scan the information. Additionally, authors can easily create such things as a Table of Contents or view an Outline.

Title or Subtitle

It is an extremely rare instance that you will use the style "Title" or "Subtitle" found in the Styles Gallery, Pane, or Pulldown. If you have questions, please reach out to accessibility@swarthmore.edu.

Heading 1

You will only ever use Heading 1 or <h1> once in your materials.

In Microsoft Office, Heading 1 will usually coincide with "Title" in the document’s metadata.
In HTML, <h1> and <title> often have some kind of relationship.

If you have questions, please reach out to accessibility@swarthmore.edu.

Screen Reader Demo With Headings [YouTube]

Convey Meaning with Words

In-program Accessibility Checkers

Captioning

Setting a Language

Many programs in most operating systems (OS) follow the overall system settings for language. To view your system's settings:

MacOS: Change the language your Mac uses
Windows: Manage the input and display language settings in Windows

Additional Resources

General Course Material Guidelines for Faculty from Accessibility@Swarthmore.
Google's Make your document or presentation more accessible.
Our Accessibility File Scan is a tool faculty, teaching and instructional staff, and anyone assisting in the preparation of course materials can utilize. These results are not currently viewable by students. This modal usually appears at the top right of every course page.
Creating Accessible Course Content from our partner, TeachAccess.
WebAIM Million Report documents the accessibility of websites over time.