DeakinCo accessible Word documents
CLIENT
DeakinCo.
PROJECT BRIEF
Create alternative versions of course materials for DeakinCo.’s Diploma of Leadership and Management for use by vision-imparied students.
DeakinCo. provides workplace solutions that assess and build the workplace skills and capabilities of organisations and individuals. A commercial arm of Deakin University, DeakinCo. offers a new model of workplace education and accreditation to address business needs.
When the Head of Client Services needed to convert a range of learning materials for its Diploma of Leadership and Management course into accessible content for vision- impaired students, she turned to Red Pony for assistance.
The first thing Red Pony’s consultants did was to establish a new Microsoft Word template with a comprehensive style set based on the institution’s existing brand guidelines to format the course content.
Our copyeditors then reviewed each document to correct errors and suggest possible improvements to the language and structure. Once these changes were approved, we created a separate accessible version of each document.
These files were then further modified to be consistent with accessibility principles and all applicable Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Throughout this process we liaised with a Vision Australia usability expert to ensure that the modifications were comprehensive and consistent with the latest guidelines. These modifications at times included a complete reformatting of elements such as images and tables, insertion of alt text descriptions and application of table header and column tags to make the content suitable for interrogation by screenreaders and other assistive technologies.
We then applied Microsoft’s own accessibility checks to review each document and identify further modifications prior to finalising the files, ready for DeakinCo. distribution to a new student cohort.
“Everything about Red Pony’s service – from the quality of the deliverables to their level of professionalism – was first rate. I also really appreciated their rapid response time for completion of the work.”