Guide for creating accessible digital content: Documents, presentations, videos, audios, and web pages

When digital content is created in any type of format (textual, graphic, audio or multimedia), it is necessary to keep in mind that users of such content may be people with physical, sensory or cognitive limitations, who could find barriers to access the information.
In fact, at some point in our lives, we all probably will have limitations that can affect our access to digital content. This is evident if we have a permanent disability. Nevertheless, even if we do not have it, it does not mean we are out of this issue. On the contrary, it is very likely that several times our physical, sensory or cognitive abilities will be temporarily reduced by any event or accident, or simply by the conditions of our environment. For example, we might ever need to hear a story in a noisy environment that prevents us from clearly hearing what the speaker is telling.
And, of course, we lose our capacities as we are aging. It is more difficult for us to access information, and we need assistive products. The clearest example is the need for corrective lenses to read small text.
In general, the use of assistive products for accessing digital content is something we all use regularly. These are often called "assistive technologies" and can be software or hardware. We do not realize that we are often using these aids. For example, when we zoom to better view the content on a screen, we are using assistive software, in this case a program to increase the size of content, which is integrated into the operating system itself.
This book will often refer to assistive technologies, which can be simple and commonly used as the zoom of the screen. However, they can be much more advanced, such as screen readers, commonly used by people with visual disabilities to hear the description of visual content that they cannot see on the screen.
Therefore it is very important that the authors of digital content take into account minimum standards to ensure that content can be used by the widest audience. It must be accessible content.
In this context, accessibility is a characteristic that makes digital content perceivable, understandable and usable by anyone, regardless of whether he or she has a disability. It is very difficult to get fully accessible content, but following some simple tips, it is easy to reach an acceptable level of accessibility, which allows interested persons to access the information without trouble.
The guidelines set out in this book are not new. In general, they are common sense recommendations, and many are suggestions proposed by the creators of content editing tools, which for some years have provided mechanisms to generate accessible content, but are often unknown by authors. Most of the guidelines are independent of the technology used in the creation of content. For example, the recommendation of “content in video format must include subtitles” is generic and applicable to any video editing technology.
This book is intended to be a practical guide. Therefore, in addition to providing guidance, examples of how to perform them using some of the most used editors of digital content are presented. Among others, Microsoft Office suite to create documents (with Word) and slide presentations (with PowerPoint) are used, because they offer advanced mechanisms that help the author to create and revise the accessibility of content.