I heard on the radio yesterday that 12% of students in New South Wales have some form of special needs that requires support from the education system. Which means that in every classroom there;s likely to be three or four students that may need additional support and more accessible resources. Given the commitment by the education system to provide support for these students (here in New South Wales, accessibility is a key consideration with IT, and the policy is to ensure that specifications for the development of new IT systems to include access considerations), I thought I’d write a reminder that the Office applications have a built in Accessibility Checker – so that teachers can quickly check that documents they are publishing are accessible – and make simple changes to ensure that all of their students can access teaching resources, homework assignments etc
Word 2010, Excel 2010, and PowerPoint 2010 all include the Accessibility Checker. By finding areas that might be challenging for users with disabilities to view or use, and by providing a task pane to review those areas, Accessibility Checker can help fix potential problems with content before it’s shared.