[ATTW-L] Sharing an "Accessible Document Design Best Practices" guide we created that we hope you all find useful

Mon Oct 2 20:12:15 UTC 2023

Congrats to Jordan, Hannah, and CDQ for taking the lead on this important
topic for our journals and field.

My two cents: I think “accessible” is the best term in this context, but
I’d be curious to learn what others think. Through its title, the CDQ guide
is now connected to other guides and websites around the web that are
focused on making documents accessible for users with disabilities. I’m not
sure another term would have the same intertextual power or be able to
convey the guide's purpose at a glance. Several major organizations and
universities (including CCCCs <https://u.osu.edu/composingaccess/>, WebAIM
<https://webaim.org/techniques/word/>, and Section 508.gov
<https://www.section508.gov/create/documents/>) have published web pages
with titles such as creating accessible documents, composing access, etc.
All are focused on designing for disability. I agree with Jordan:
"accessibility" is the common term here.

That said, there’s obviously overlap between designing for disabled users
and designing for all (two examples: Universal Design and Search Engine
Optimization). And, as Jordan points out, disability is a wide-ranging
term. Several topics covered in Jordan’s guide—semantic headings, plain
language, descriptive link text (instead of “click here” links)—make
documents more usable for everyone. But the goals are not identical, even
though we have seen the interests of disabled and nondisabled users
converge around several accessibility practices—captioning being the best
example of interest convergence
<https://www.axios.com/2023/08/20/gen-z-millennials-tv-movies-subtitles>.

Best,

Sean Zdenek

On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 11:07 AM Jordan Frith <frithjh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Stephen,
> That's a good question, and thank you for asking! So the term
> "accessibility" is often used to talk about designing for people with
> disabilities, though disabilities is defined broadly to include any
> mobility impairments, cognitive disabilities, etc. Also, the certification
> we completed was called "document accessibility", so as far as I know
> that's a pretty common term. I also had Sean Zdenek, who's an expert in
> this area, look over the document and he didn't comment on the title.
>
> I think the reason we wouldn't want to title it something like "Designing
> documents for people with disabilities" is because so many of us tend to
> have a limited view of who counts as disabled (often not including people
> with cognitive disabilities like dyslexia, for example). Does that make
> sense? I am open to suggestions for alternative titles though! At this
> point, it might be hard to change the title for this version at least
> because the link is already up, but I can think about it for the next
> version. Let me know what you think!
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 10:17 AM Stephen Bernhardt <sab at udel.edu> wrote:
>
>> Interesting and valuable work here.
>>
>> It may just be me, but I experience some ambiguity with the phrase
>> "Accessible Document Design." Are the recommended guidelines to assure
>> accessibility to the widest possible audience (designing documents to be
>> usable) or to assure accessibility to the specific audience of persons with
>> one sort of disability or another?
>>
>> Are these goals identical? On reading the email, I first imagined the
>> broader, more general case. But the guidance quickly corrected me in its
>> focus on readers with disabilities.
>>
>>
>> Steve Bernhardt
>> Bayside DE
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 1, 2023 at 2:50 PM Jordan Frith <frithjh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> I'm emailing to share a resource we created at *Communication Design
>>> Quarterly *that is likely relevant to many people on this listserv: A
>>> best-practices guide to accessible document design
>>> <https://cdq.sigdoc.org/accessible-document-design/>. I co-wrote this
>>> guide with Hannah Taylor, and it focuses on various things people can do to
>>> make your documents more accessible for a larger number of readers. The
>>> guide covers various topics, including
>>>
>>>    - designing documents to work well with screen readers
>>>    - writing high quality alt text
>>>    - formatting hyperlinks to make them accessible to people who use
>>>    screen readers
>>>    - running accessibility image checks
>>>    - tagging content for accessibility in PDFs
>>>    - running accessibility checkers
>>>
>>> By no means is this guide comprehensive, but we hope people find it
>>> valuable. Accessible document design is way more complex than most people
>>> realize (certainly more complex than I realized), so we created this
>>> document as a starting point for people who want to learn more about the
>>> topic. Accessibility should be centered in everything we do, so we hope
>>> this guide helps us all learn a bit more about how to make the documents we
>>> produce more accessible.
>>>
>>> Feel free to share widely, and don't hesitate to reach out to me if you
>>> have feedback or thoughts or anything at all really :).
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Jordan Frith, Ph.D.
>>>
>>> Pearce Professor of Professional Communication
>>>
>>> Clemson University
>>>
>>> Pronouns: He/Him
>>>
>>> Editor-in-Chief, *Communication Design Quarterly*
>>>
>>> Editor, *The X-Series <https://parlorpress.com/pages/x-series>*, Parlor
>>> Press
>>>
>>> My Google Scholar Profile
>>> <https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OtvmSE0AAAAJ&hl=en>
>>>
>>> My personal website <https://jordanfrith.com/>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ATTW-L mailing list
>>> ATTW-L at attw.org
>>> http://attw.org/mailman/listinfo/attw-l_attw.org
>>>
>>
>
> --
>
> Jordan Frith, Ph.D.
>
> Pearce Professor of Professional Communication
>
> Clemson University
>
> Pronouns: He/Him
>
> Editor-in-Chief, *Communication Design Quarterly*
>
> Editor, *The X-Series <https://parlorpress.com/pages/x-series>*, Parlor
> Press
>
> My Google Scholar Profile
> <https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OtvmSE0AAAAJ&hl=en>
>
> My personal website <https://jordanfrith.com/>
> _______________________________________________
> ATTW-L mailing list
> ATTW-L at attw.org
> http://attw.org/mailman/listinfo/attw-l_attw.org
>
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