Half day accessibility for content creators

This half day (approximately 4 hour) workshop is designed for information workers — analysts, program managers, communications staff, policy writers, and subject matter experts — who routinely produce reports, briefings, dashboards, and presentations that are published to large public audiences. It is not a developer training. The focus is on the everyday authoring tools these teams already use (Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF) and on the legal and policy environment that governs the content they publish. The standards-and-laws section is delivered in either a U.S.-focused or a global flavor, depending on where the participants’ audiences are.

At a glance

Audience: analysts, program managers, communications and public affairs staff, policy writers, subject matter experts, advocates, and anyone in your organization who authors reports, briefings, fact sheets, slide decks, or dashboards published to a public audience.
Format: approximately 4 hours of live, instructor-led training delivered remotely over Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Group size: capped at 15 participants per session to keep the hands-on portions interactive.
Schedule options: a single half-day block, or two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days.
Language: English.
Customization: choose a U.S.-focused or global flavor for the standards-and-laws section, and have sample documents drawn from your organization’s own templates and publications on request.
Materials provided: slides, sample Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files for the exercises, a tagged-PDF reference, and a pre-publication accessibility checklist participants can apply to their own work the next day.
Accessibility of the training itself: live captions, accessible slides and exercise files, and reasonable accommodations available on request.
Session recording: available on request for participants who cannot attend live.
Technical requirements: Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (Microsoft 365 or Office 2019 or newer) installed locally; Adobe Acrobat Reader is sufficient for the PDF portion (Acrobat Pro is helpful but not required).

Learning objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

Explain who is impacted by inaccessible documents and what assistive technologies their readers use.
Navigate the legal and policy landscape — in either a U.S.-focused or global flavor — that applies to public-facing content their team publishes.
Read an Accessibility Conformance Report when evaluating templates, document generators, or publishing tools.
Produce accessible Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint decks, Excel files, and tagged PDFs using the authoring features already built into Office.
Write effective alt text for images, charts, and infographics, and know when to use a long description or accompanying data table.
Apply a reusable pre-publication accessibility checklist before any document goes out the door.

What is Accessibility?

Explain the common categories of disability — visual, hearing, motor, cognitive, speech, and situational — and how each affects the way people consume reports, slide decks, spreadsheets, and PDF documents. Walk through the adaptive technologies these audiences rely on, including screen readers, screen magnifiers, switch access, voice control, captions, reading-order tools, and the built-in accessibility features on desktop and mobile platforms. Show concrete examples of how a well-intentioned but inaccessible report or slide deck breaks for a screen reader user, a person with low vision, or a person with a cognitive disability — and how small authoring habits remove those barriers. Discuss why accessibility matters for organizations that publish to the public: reaching the full audience the content is meant to serve, equity and inclusion of constituents with disabilities, brand and trust, and legal and policy obligations.

Standards, Laws, and Policy

A practical tour of the rules that apply to content published by government bodies and by organizations that serve the public. This section is delivered in one of two flavors — U.S.-focused or global — depending on the audience. Both versions cover WCAG and Accessibility Conformance Reports as common ground; the rest of the section is tailored to the laws and standards most relevant to where the participants publish.

Common to both versions

WCAG — what the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are, how Principles, Guidelines, Success Criteria, and conformance levels (A, AA, AAA) work, what is changing in WCAG 3.0, and why WCAG AA is the baseline that nearly every accessibility law and policy in the world references.
Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACR / VPAT) — what an ACR is, how the ITI VPAT template aligns with WCAG, Section 508, and EN 301 549, what “Supports / Partially Supports / Does Not Support” really mean, and how content creators can use vendor ACRs when choosing templates, document generators, dashboards, and publishing platforms.
Practical implications for publishers — what these standards collectively mean for a team that publishes reports, fact sheets, slide decks, and PDFs to a public audience: documents are in scope, must meet WCAG AA, and a remediation plan is not a substitute for accessible authoring.

U.S.-focused version

For teams publishing to U.S. audiences, especially federal, state, and local government bodies and organizations that receive federal funding or serve the public.

ADA Title II — what the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II requires of state and local governments, and the Department of Justice rule that adopts WCAG for web content and mobile apps, including the limited exceptions (archived content, preexisting conventional electronic documents, third-party content, and password-protected individualized documents).
ADA Title III — how Title III applies to places of public accommodation and the case law that has shaped expectations for accessible websites and digital content.
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act — what Section 508 requires of U.S. federal agencies and their contractors, the Revised 508 Standards harmonized with WCAG, and how Section 508 governs electronic documents, presentations, and forms produced or distributed by federal programs.
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act — obligations of recipients of federal funding, including HHS rules that extend WCAG to web content and mobile apps of HHS-funded programs.
21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) — relevance for captioned and described video content distributed online.
State-level laws — examples such as California’s Government Code 7405 and AB 434, New York’s policies, and other state and municipal procurement and web-accessibility requirements that frequently reference WCAG and Section 508.

Global version

For teams publishing to international audiences, or for multinational organizations that need to satisfy multiple jurisdictions at once.

European Accessibility Act (EAA) — what the EAA covers, who it applies to, and how it pulls private-sector products and services — including e-commerce, banking, and e-books — into scope across the EU.
EN 301 549 — the European harmonized standard covering web, mobile, software, hardware, electronic documents, and ICT documentation, and how it incorporates WCAG by reference.
EU Web Accessibility Directive — requirements for public-sector bodies’ websites, mobile apps, and downloadable documents, including accessibility statements and feedback mechanisms.
United Kingdom — the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations.
Canada — the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) for federally regulated entities and provincial laws such as Ontario’s AODA (and its Information and Communications Standards) and similar laws in Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia.
Australia and New Zealand — the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and the Australian Government’s Digital Service Standard, and New Zealand’s Web Accessibility Standard.
Other notable jurisdictions — Ireland’s National Disability Authority code of practice, Japan’s JIS X 8341 series, Israel’s IS 5568, India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act and GIGW guidelines, and other regional regulations that build on WCAG.
Document-specific international standards — PDF/UA (ISO 14289) and ISO/IEC 40500 (the ISO adoption of WCAG), and how they apply to documents published across borders.
United States, briefly — a short overview of ADA Title II, Section 508, and Section 504 for global teams whose publications also reach U.S. audiences.

Creating Accessible Documents and Presentations

The hands-on heart of the workshop. Working in the tools participants already use every day, with sample reports and decks, learners practice the authoring habits that produce accessible deliverables the first time — without depending on a downstream remediation team.

Foundations that apply to every document — meaningful titles and filenames, clear language, logical reading order, real heading structure (not bold-and-bigger), descriptive link text, sufficient color contrast, never relying on color alone, and accessible use of typography and white space.
Microsoft Word — applying built-in heading styles, lists, and table styles; marking decorative vs. informative images; writing effective alternative text (and using the “mark as decorative” option appropriately); accessible tables with header rows and no merged or split cells; accessible footnotes, captions, and cross-references; setting the document language; and using the Accessibility Checker to catch issues before publishing.
Microsoft PowerPoint — using built-in slide layouts so the reading order and title structure are correct for screen readers; setting and verifying reading order in the Selection Pane; accessible slide titles (including hidden titles for visual designs); alt text for images, charts, SmartArt, and grouped objects; accessible tables and embedded media; avoiding text in images; designing for color contrast and large enough type; speaker notes as an accessibility tool; and exporting to PDF without losing tags.
Microsoft Excel — meaningful sheet and cell content, named ranges, table headers, accessible chart alt text and data labels, avoiding empty rows and columns inside data, and patterns for dashboards and data tables that screen reader users can navigate.
PDFs — what makes a PDF accessible (tags, reading order, language, document title, bookmarks for long documents, accessible form fields), how to produce a tagged PDF correctly from Word and PowerPoint, the limits of post-hoc remediation, and a brief look at PDF/UA (ISO 14289) and Acrobat’s accessibility tools.
Charts, infographics, and data visualizations — how to convey the same information to a non-sighted reader through alt text, long descriptions, and accompanying data tables, and when to redesign rather than annotate.
Images, icons, and screenshots — writing alt text that conveys purpose, not pixels; handling charts of charts, screenshots of tables, and decorative imagery; and avoiding text baked into images.
Video and audio in presentations — captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions, and what is required when content is published to the public.
Templates and reusable assets — building or selecting accessible Word, PowerPoint, and report templates so the team’s default starting point is already accessible, and small editorial checklists the team can adopt.
Pre-publication checklist — a short, repeatable checklist participants leave with, plus a walkthrough of the built-in Accessibility Checker in each Office app and what it does and does not catch.

Participants leave with practical authoring habits, a reusable pre-publication checklist, and a clear understanding of the legal landscape that makes accessible documents not just a good idea but a requirement for content published to the public.

Bring this workshop to your team

Contact us to schedule a session for your team, choose between the U.S.-focused or global flavor of the standards section, request that the exercises use your organization’s own report and presentation templates, or ask about combining this workshop with our other trainings.