Well-organised references are important in order for blind and visually impaired students to be able to navigate your document. Metadata help them to store the document in a logical place and find it again.

Table of contents

The scroll function is useless for the blind, and people with motor disabilities may find scrolling difficult or impossible. A linked table of contents at the beginning of each document is therefore indispensable.

All other references should also be formatted as clickable hyperlinks:

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• Within a document (for example, “see Chapter 2”)
• From a document to a website
• Within a website
• From a website to a file: If you link to a downloadable file (e. g. a PDF or an audio file) from your website, indicate the file type and size: “Read this text as an article (PDF, 4 MB)”

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All links must always be marked with a descriptive link title. If the title is missing, screen readers will only read “link” without naming the destination. More details on creating links and references can be found in Chapter 6.

Bibliographic data/footnotes

Bibliographic data are also references. Whenever possible, put these in footnotes. Inline citations break up the screen reader’s reading flow, making comprehension more difficult for blind readers and for visually impaired readers who use large magnification. Endnotes are also an obstacle for these readers, as well as for individuals with motor disabilities.

If a document contains footnotes, you should provide it to your students in MS Word format. PDFs lose the structural connection between the footnote symbol and footnote text, so that the screen reader will simply read all the footnotes at the end of the page.

Languages

The languages in a document or website must be marked correctly for a screen reader to be able to read the text. A document’s main language can be indicated in the metadata, and other languages contained in the text should be marked in the individual sections of the document itself. Further details on this can be found in Chapter 6.

Screen readers usually mispronounce individual foreign words in a text. However, in a university context they are often unavoidable. You can assume that your blind students will generally be able to understand such terms.

Titles and metadata

Files and websites not only have a file name, they may also be described by various metadata. These metadata can be read by screen readers and help your students to find/identify the file.

Watermarks

Avoid using watermarks. They make the document difficult to read for people with visual impairments.