About the Checklists

While Microsoft Office applications and Adobe Acrobat both contain built in accessibility checkers, these tools should not be used as the only way to check documents for accessibility. Visual inspection of the content within documents is required to ensure that assistive technology users can access and comprehend all information being provided in the manner intended.

As this is the case, having a checklist of items that should be inspected can save time and effort when reviewing content for potential accessibility issues.

Before continuing it is important to note that the checklists are not designed to tell you how to create documents that are accessible, or to provide instructions on how to remediate documents for accessibility. The checklists are designed to:

• Provide a simple list of items that need to be checked to ensure that documents are accessible to all users, regardless of their use or non-use of assistive technology.
• Provide accessibility questions (“checks”) about each type of document content. The questions are designed to be easy to answer and serve as a guide about what should be done to make documents accessible. Each question is followed up with a rationale that supports the need to make the content accessible for all.

Checklist Items

• The items within the checklists found on this site are based on both the US Access Board Section 508 Standards for Electronic and Information Technology , as well as the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) recommendations.
• The checklists also include some general usability recommendations which are derived from industry usability best practices and the author’s experience with accessible document creation and remediation.

The Checklists

• Word
• PowerPoint
• PDF

Refer to the “ Tutorials and More” section of this site for links to self-help tutorials, recorded trainings and other document accessibility related resources.