CDQ’s Accessible Document Design Best Practices guide

TL;DR: CDQ created an “Accessible Document Design Best Practices” guide that covers various ways to make documents more accessible.

CDQ is dedicated to making our publication as accessible as possible. The editorial team tries our best to make sure our articles follow accessibility guidelines. Before we publish an article or an issue, we work with authors to create proper alt text, use headings and content tags, include adequate color contrast, and so on. Additionally, we are focused on making sure all CDQ PDFs are properly tagged and structured, and we use screen readers to test our articles before we officially publish them.

Accessible document design is a more complex process than many people realize, and the CDQ’s current Editor-in-Chief (Jordan Frith) and former editorial assistant (Hannah Taylor) completed the excellent WebAIM document accessibility certification to learn more about the process. Hannah and Jordan then created an “Accessible Document Design Best Practices” guide that was initially designed for SIGDOC members and CDQ authors. However, the content is relevant to anyone who creates documents, so we decided to make it publicly available because accessibility is too important to silo behind paywalls. The guide is by no means a comprehensive account of everything involved in the document design process, but we hope it’s a good place to start.

Hannah and Jordan also want to thank the many people who provided invaluable help as we learned about accessible document design and created this guide:

• The SIGDOC Executive Board (led by former SIGDOC Chair Dan Richards) approved the funding for Hannah and Jordan to sign up for WebAIM’s document accessibility course.
• The amazing people at Utah State University’s Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice created WebAIM and the accessibility course that made this guide possible.
• CDQ’s Associate Editor Amber Lancaster provided invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this document. She also has extensive experience testing documents with screen readers that informed our guide.
• Sean Zdenek gave extensive feedback on an early draft, and he’s been our go-to source for accessibility questions.

Please reach out to CDQ’s Editor-in-Chief (jfrith@clemson.edu) if you have any questions about the guide or notice anything we should change. Feel free to share the document widely and use it in your classes if you find it relevant (and don’t hesitate let us know if you do because we’d love to hear from you!).