Documents and Resources

Selecting Documents and Resources for Your Course

• Books: Pick books that are available in both hardcopy and electronic formats. Consider using Open Educational Resources (OER).
• Documents: Check all selected documents (PDF, Word, etc.) for accessibility when developing your course.
• Websites: Check websites and links to make sure that students are able to access the resource. If you are not sure if the website is accessible, consider providing the information as a text document, and not a link.
• Articles: When linking to online articles, check to be sure there are no viewing limits or paywalls.

Naming and Organizing Files

• Naming Files: Course files (assigned readings, articles, images, etc.) will have sensible file names or files will be identified by file name if not provided as a meaningful link in text (i.e., if the class is assigned Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 3, the relevant file will be named “Alice In Wonderland Ch 3.pdf,” for example, and not “20070811 libnotes pp 34-65.pdf” OR students will be explicitly told that “20070811 libnotes pp 34-65.pdf” is the correct file to read for that assignment)
• Citation Information: Provide full citation information for all assigned readings.

Are PDFs accessible?

There are many misconceptions about PDF documents. A PDF, or "Portable Document Format" is nothing more than a container that holds information. A PDF can hold very inaccessible material—such as a scanned copy of an image or page of text—or it can hold accessible information—such as an accessible Word document that was converted to PDF. It is much easier (and less time-consuming) to create an accessible PDF when the original document is accessible than it is to fix a PDF that was created in an inaccessible way. There are many strategies you can use to ensure that your PDF documents are accessible.

Check all PDFs before assigning them

• Is the PDF an image file or is the text accessible? If you click on a page and it turns blue, this is an image and not text. If you can click and drag to highlight text, the document might be accessible (text is not always recognized correctly if the quality of the original document is poor).
• Are parts of the document cut off or illegible?
• Are there annotations or marks that make the text hard to read?
• Is the reading from an outdated source?

Curate your PDF collection

• Do not use scanned PDFs. 
• Set document properties:
  • Add Document Title (Description Tab)
  • Add Author (Description Tab)
  • Set the “Show” dropdown to “Document Title” instead of the “File Name” (Initial View tab)
  • Set the document language (Advanced tab) to reflect the language of the document.
• All PDFs should be tagged.
• Add bookmarks to any document longer than nine pages.
• Where no method exists to correct content, provide an alternative version (such as a Microsoft Word document)

• Do not justify text (aligned to both the left and right margins). Set text to be left-justified.
• Tables that span multiple pages should have a header row set to repeat at the top of each page.
• Set the language of the document. If necessary, set the language of page parts.
• Multi-column content is created using built-in tools
• Use built-in tools to create structural elements such as columns, table of contents, tables, and lists.
• Avoid the use of text boxes whenever possible.
• Use comments and track changes for collaboration (instead of color and highlighting)