Document Accessibility in Colorado
Inclusive Digital Communication Through Education and Training
Elizabeth Coughanour Feb 13, 2024
Keeping step with the Colorado legislature's 2023 digital accessibility rules, CIDE has been delivering training to educators and government employees to make digital documents more inclusive.
What is a digital document?
The documents we find online might be anything from class assignments to voter registration to garbage pickup schedules. They are usually PDF (Portable Document Format) files that you can download and read on a computer or mobile device. Finding and using these documents is so common these days, that people without disabilities can sometimes take it for granted. But for individuals with various disabilities, it can be almost impossible to get important information because documents are often inaccessible.
What makes a document inaccessible?
There are a lot of ways a document can be difficult for people with disabilities to use (many more than are listed here). Here are just a few examples:
It is difficult to read
Evan has a learning disability. He wants to sign up for a class through the local library, but the information brochure is laid out in a cluttered way that makes it hard to keep his place.
It is unreadable by assistive technology
Celeste is blind and uses a screen reader to access the internet. She loves to garden and is trying to find information about planting zones in her city. The PDF on the county website was published incorrectly and her screen reader can’t access the information she needs.
It is difficult to navigate
Rigby doesn’t have full use of his hands and uses a keyboard instead of a mouse to move around his computer screen. He has just opened a PDF newsletter from his email but as he uses his keyboard to move through the newsletter his cursor jumps from the first paragraph all the way to the end and then somewhere in the middle. The author of the newsletter didn’t publish it correctly and the navigation is disconnected from the content. Rigby sees this problem often. He stops reading.
What is CIDE doing to help?
This spring, CIDE’s document accessibility specialists conducted a series of online training sessions for government workers in Montrose and Garfield County and over 100 educators and clinicians connected through the SWAAAC program. These Zoom-based workshops gave participants the skills they needed to create accessible documents.
Attendees of these training courses will now be able to create documents that comply with state and national regulations and are more accessible to people like Evan, Celeste, and Rigby. As technology keeps changing, we are dedicated to making sure everyone can access the internet equally.
Learn More
If your organization is committed to creating accessible digital documents, you can learn more about this training series on the Document Accessibility Trainings page of our website.
If you have any questions please reach out to our team at CIDE@ucdenver.edu for more details.