Document Accessibility

Make your linked documents accessible to people with disabilities

Current accessibility rules state that, other than documents published before 23 September 2018, where they’re not essential to providing your services*, all attached website documents should comply with government accessibility regulations.

For newly created documents produced in Word or Excel, for example, we recommend you use the inbuilt Accessibility checker. The option can normally be found via the File Tab > Check for Issues button > Check Accessibility.

Once checked it’s a good idea to then save the Word or Excel document as a pdf by using File > Save As > Save As Type > PDF (*.pdf). No all users have Word, but all can open a PDF file.

For documents already linked from your website we recommend you download each one and check using the Word / Excel accessibility checking tools above or, if you want to check a PDF document, you can use the PAVE tool (see Resources below). PAVE checks and corrects (though not always everything, if not possible to do). For instance, a PDF document that has been scanned, it's unlikely this will be corrected and you should find the original Word document and re-save it as a PDF.

What you need to do

If not using our Accessibility services, check all pages on your website and correct all qualifying documents (i.e. all outside the criteria for exception in the Notes section below).

Document checking tool

PAVE Website

PAVE is a very good free tool to check and help correct your PDF documents.

Resources

Understanding accessibility requirements for public sector bodies (.gov reference page)

How the accessibility regulations will be monitored and enforced (.gov reference page)

Make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities (Microsoft)

Make your Excel documents accessible to people with disabilities (Microsoft)

Publishing accessible documents (.gov)

Word 2010 - Making Word Documents Accessible (WebAIM)

Word 2013 - Making Word Documents Accessible (WebAIM)

Notes