If a content management system already has a WYSIWYG editor like the CK editor, then you will see an ‘add table’ icon. For proper accessibility, you should choose a header row, or header column, or both, depending on your data.
If you are running a WordPress site, you’ll notice the absence of a table button. It’s not functionality you can get in an out-of-the-box installation of WordPress, but there are plugins available.
Year
Title
Department
2020
Social Distancing
Pandemic
2019
Crowded Concerts
Carefree Abandon
I used the TablePress plugin to build the above table.
This accessibility care package is a set of trainings and tools that can help with identifying what steps you can take to start creating accessible content from the beginning. Make your native file documents accessible from the start to get PDFs that are better for screen readers. Use checklists before publishing content to ensure your content accessibility.
I’m creating a presentation about accessibility that fills a gap I noticed in the current training patterns around digital accessibility. For the past five years, I would attend conference sessions, presentations, and online trainings about accessibility but very few presenters were showing the audience what it is like to experience content through assistive technologies. I’ve got a recorded interview lined up for my presentation so that my audience can hear screen readers announce content. As a followup to my presentation, I’m creating this accessibility care package for people new to accessibility.
Test your text color values for color contrast ratios. It gives you a simple pass or fail for different text sizes. This applies to printed documents, too.
Site Improve’s free toolkit. Site Improve offers a paid software, but they also have these free checker tools such as a Chrome extension and a color contrast checker.
Training
How to write alt text. There are ways and ways to approach alt text. I don’t have any definitive answers for this, except that you can make it brief. If an image is text heavy, it is better practice to re-describe it in the body copy, or use a screen reader only class to type out the content just for screen readers.
Site Improve’s Basics of Web Accessibility. I use this product at work because my agency pays for the license. They are an international company so this blog post includes technical standards from other countries.
Add Paragraph Styles: InDesign. When you set up your file with paragraph styles it makes it easier to map styles to tags for your export to PDF.
How to map a Style to a Tag in InDesign. It would be really great if your InDesign section headers and major content headers could have the tags H1, H2, H3. That way, when you export to PDF, the digital version will have semantic markup and the bookmarks should be automatic from document structure.
PDFs are not automatically accessible. You need to run a few tools in the full version of Acrobat to get full accessibility. Unfortunately, the free program Reader will not do these things.
By the way, I did write a term paper about accessibility while earning my bachelor’s degree in technical communication. See my portfolio accessibility page to read it.
