Guide for creating accessible digital content Documents, presentations, videos, audios and web pages José Ramón Hilera González Elena Campo Montalvo Eva García López Antonio García Cabot (Editors) Guide for creating accessible digital content: Documents, presentations, videos, audios, and web pages by José Ramón Hilera González, Elena Campo Montalvo, Eva García López & Antonio García Cabot (Eds.) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - Share Alike 4.0 International License. Copyright of all trademarks, trade names, logos and images are the property of their respective owners. Publications Office of the University of Alcalá, 2015 ISBN: 978-84-15834-82-3 Digital version available at: www.esvial.org. The suggested citation is: J.R. Hilera González, E. Campo Montalvo, E. García-López, A. García Cabot (Eds.) (2015). Guide for creating accessible digital content: Documents, presentations, videos, audios, and web pages (1st ed.). Alcalá de Henares, Spain: University of Alcalá. This publication is the result of “Educación Superior Virtual Inclusiva – América Latina (ESVI-AL) Project”, funded within European Union ALFA III Program (DCI- ALA/19.09.01/11/21526/279-146/ALFA III(2011)11). The content of this publication does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed lies entirely with the authors. In this publication have collaborated European and Latin American authors from partners universities in ESVI-AL Project. Editors: Authors (alphabetical order): Hilera González, José Ramón Águila Chávez, Óscar de Jesús Campo Montalvo, Elena Bengochea Martínez, Luis García López, Eva Cabrera Loayza, María del Carmen García Cabot, Antonio Chicaiza Espinosa, Janneth Diez Folledo, Teresa Domínguez Alda, María José Fernández Sanz, Luis Pagés Arévalo, Carmen Preciado Mesa, Yolanda Patricia Quintanilla Flores, Rocío Alicia Valencia Chaverra, María Patricia Partners in ESVI-AL Project: European: Universidad de Alcalá (UAH), Spain (Administrative Coordination). Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences (UMET), Finland. Universidade de Lisboa (ULI), Portugal. Latin American: Universidad Galileo (UGAL), Guatemala (Technical Coordination). Fundación Universitaria Católica del Norte (UCN), Colombia. Universidad Continental (UC), Perú. Universidad de la República (URU), Uruguay. Universidad Nacional de Asunción (UNA), Paraguay. Universidad Politécnica de El Salvador (UPES), El Salvador. Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL), Ecuador. International cooperating organizations: Disabled People's International (DPI). International Social Security Association (ISSA). Virtual Educa (VE). Unión Latinoamericana de Ciegos (ULAC). GUIDE FOR CREATING ACCESSIBLE DIGITAL CONTENT Foreword 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. vii FOREWORD 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. This guide is useful for creating accessible digital content, even if the reader does not use the editing tools showed in the practical cases, because requirements can be found for such content, and it is easy to locate the features in another editor. For example, to meet the requirement that every image in a document or GUIDE FOR CREATING ACCESSIBLE DIGITAL CONTENT presentation should have a text that describes it, this guide explains how to do it in a few editors, but any current editor allows the author to enter that description, and the user only has to find such functionality in the editor used. The book consists of five chapters, which try to cover the widest variety of digital content formats. Each chapter has been created by different authors, who come from a total of four different countries: Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Spain. The first chapter is about how to create accessible documents with a text processor. This chapter provides general guidelines that can be applied using any text processor. These guidelines start with the requirement of establishing the language of the document, which is important because the screen reader used by a blind person generates the audio in the same language of the document. After that, many other recommendations are described for getting accessible documents. Finally, the way to use the tools for checking the accessibility of a document is described. The second chapter shows general guidelines for creating accessible presentations, as well as practical cases using PowerPoint. Many of the recommendations introduced in the first chapter are showed again in this chapter, although they are adapted to a presentations editor. Moreover, one section describes how to check the accessibility using tools such as PowerPoint. The third chapter is dedicated to the accessibility of files and documents in PDF format. In this case, if the PDF document is obtained using an accessible source document we could confirm that the resulting PDF is accessible. However, in some situations there are non-accessible PDF documents published in the web, and therefore the source version is not available. Because of this, this chapter shows how to use the tools for automatically checking the accessibility of a PDF document, as well as the way to solve some accessibility issues directly in a PDF document. The fourth chapter is based on accessible audiovisual content. It is divided into two main sections: the first part is based on accessibility in videos, which explains ix FOREWORD how to easily create videos with subtitles and an audio description; and the second part is about audiobooks, which shows how to convert a text document into voice and into an audiobook format, compatible with the main players. The fifth chapter is about accessibility in webpages. Much of the digital content currently used is showed in a webpage format, so it is important to provide accessible web content. In this field, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization responsible of providing the standards supported in websites, such as HTML or CSS languages. The aim of this organization is also to promote accessibility in webpages, by providing recommendations. This chapter is oriented to describe the guidelines about accessible web content, known as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines have to be taking into account when