Title: Interesting items on MSOffice Suite and PDF Accessibility
Course: Web Accessibility MOOC for Educators > Section: Creating Accessible MSOffice and PDF Materials

The United States Access Board is considering updating accessibility standards for information and communication technology (ICT) in the federal sector covered by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. And any changes would also update guidelines for telecommunications equipment subject to Section 255 of the Communications Act.

Under consideration is the need to address fundamental shifts and trends in the market, such as the convergence of technologies and the increasingly multi-functional capabilities of products like smart phones. Another key goal of this update is to promote consistency with other requirements in the U.S. and abroad in order to improve accessibility and to facilitate compliance. A leading reference, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), is incorporated into the rule and applied to web-based content as well as to offline documents and software.

The Great Lakes ADA Center holds numerous webinars on section 508 best practices, and their July 2015 webinar was on audio descriptions.  They also have created a series of key concepts and checklists handouts for the MS Office suite and Adobe Acrobat. I found their checklist for MSWord interesting and am considering passing it out to our administrative aides who produce many of the documents used by the public.

For this discussion, we will be building a resource page for information or resources which deal with MSOffice suite and/or Adobe PDF's. Add your resources to this thread so everyone can benefit from your research.