About Alternate Formats

Whenever possible, it is advisable to post course materials in their native formats of Word or PowerPoint instead of adding the extra step of creating a PDF that made require further remediation.  This also eliminates the future need to remediate a PDF again every time the source document changes.

Current screen reader software is generally much better at reading properly accessible Word and PowerPoint documents directly than at reading remediated PDFs made from those documents.  Information on creating accessible Word documents and PowerPoint presentations is available at the Accessibility in Word Canvas Course and the Accessibility in PowerPoint Canvas Course.

When including Library Articles in your course materials, provide a link to the online HTML version instead of, or in addition to downloading and posting the article as a PDF, which may contain accessibility issues.  HTML also offers a much better user experience on a mobile device. PDF files are not easy to navigate unless the user downloads a PDF reader such as the Acrobat app.

Faculty may be concerned about posting source documents, and it is true that students can modify downloaded Word documents more easily than PDF documents, but even PDF documents can be edited with Adobe Acrobat or other PDF editing software.