The library offers a range of helpful services. All of our appointments are free of charge and confidential.
Your audience may include a wide range of individuals with diverse abilities. Some of these abilities can impact how people access and read your thesis. Consider abilities such as visual, auditory, speech, physical, cognitive, neurological, or their combination and if there are barriers in your content that may affect an individual’s ability to interact with it.
Please note that MS Word thesis templates (e.g., monograph-style and manuscript-style) are available on the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies’ (OGPS) Preparation of your Thesis website. These templates and the accompanying ‘Formatting your thesis document in Microsoft Office Word (PDF)’ guide (which provides detailed instructions on how to use the built-in formatting tools) support the creation of a more accessible thesis document.
In addition, following general principles of universally accessible content will support you in creating a thesis document that can be accessed and read by the widest audience possible.
Structuring your document with headings will help readers understand how the content of a page is organized and will allow them to easily navigate throughout the document.
In Microsoft Office (MS) Word, headings can be added to a document using the built-in Styles options.
Whether you are creating your own thesis document from scratch, or are using an OGPS thesis template, be sure to follow these principles for document structure:
Alternative text (alt text) is a machine-readable tag that describes an image (e.g., photographs, figures, charts, graphs) in words. Alternative text is read by screen readers allowing the content and function of the images to be accessible to those with visual or cognitive disabilities.
Only informative images need alt text. A decorative image that provides no information and only serves an aesthetic purpose does not need alt text (some applications allow marking such image as ‘decorative’).
To add alt text to an image:
Alt text should convey the content and function of the image accurately and succinctly.
Please refer to WebAIMs’s Alternative Text website for additional guidance in creating alternative text.
Users who navigate using a screen reader must be able to unambiguously understand the purpose of the link and skip links they are not interested in. To achieve this, link text needs to be:
When using colours in your document:
Avoid doing this:
Do this instead:
Tables should be created directly in MS Word as opposed to inserting an image or screenshot of the table(s) and should have a simple structure.
When creating tables:
Avoid the use of hard returns (i.e., Enter key) and spacing to create white space in your document. To add spacing in your document, use the Paragraph Settings tools to add spacing, indentation, and breaks into your document.
To create structured lists, use the List Paragraph styles to create:
The MS Word Accessibility Checker will scan your document for common issues that may make your document less accessible for users with disabilities. You can run an accessibility check at any time while you work on your document. You can also keep the checker open while you work to flag and fix issues as you go.
Note that not all accessibility issues/errors will be flagged by the built-in checker but running the accessibility check is a good first step and helpful to flag areas where improvements should be made.
To run the Accessibility Checker:
After running the Checker, ‘Inspection Results’ may display one or more of the following messages:
Clicking an item in the ‘Inspection Results’ list will take you directly to the issue. The item will be removed from the inspection results automatically once it has been fixed. You do not need to re-run the checker.
It is important to properly convert your document to a tagged PDF to avoid losing its accessibility features such as tagging and alt text.
Please do not ‘Print to PDF’ when exporting an MS Word document to PDF. A screen reader user may still be able to access the text of a PDF created in this way, but heading structure, alternative text, and any other tag structure will be lost.
In Adobe Acrobat, select ‘File’, then ‘Create’, and finally ‘PDF from File’. In the Open window, navigate to, and select the desired document to convert. Click on ‘Open’ to begin the file conversion.
Click on the Acrobat tab in the main navigation tool bar. Click on ‘Create PDF’ and then click on ‘Options’. In the Adobe PDFMaker window make sure that the radio button for ‘Enable Accessibility and Reflow with tagged Adobe PDF’ is checked.
In MS Word, select ‘File’ and then ‘Save As’. Select ‘PDF’ from the ‘Save as type” drop down list. Click on the ‘Options’ button and make sure the radio button for ‘Document structure tags for accessibility’ is checked. Click on ‘OK’ and then ‘Save’.
In MS Word, open the File application and select ‘Save As’. Select ‘PDF’ from the ‘File Format’ list. Make sure the radio button for ‘Best for electronic distribution and accessibility (uses Microsoft online service’ is checked. Then click on ‘Export’.
This guide was adapted with permission from Making Thesis Accessible by University of Toronto Libraries.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.