Accessible course materials help ensure that all learners can engage with instructional content independently and effectively. Creating accessible documents helps students all students access content. When creating documents for teaching, accessibility should be considered as part of the document’s design, not as a final compliance check.
Practices such as using meaningful heading structures, descriptive links, accessible tables, alternative text for images, and sufficient color contrast can make documents easier to navigate and understand for students using assistive technologies while also improving usability for all learners. For example, accessible documents support those that screen readers as well as all users quickly find what they need in long documents.
As a reminder, it is best to distribute documents in its native file format, which means do not convert a Microsoft Word or Google Doc into a PDF but instead provide it as the original format to learners. For step-by-step guidance on creating and checking accessible documents, visit MSU's guidance for Microsoft Word or Google Doc accessibility.