At AfriCHI, we are committed to fostering inclusion and accessibility for all participants. Ensuring that your submissions and the conference are accessible is essential, as it ensures that everyone, including people with disabilities, can engage with your work. This guide will help you make your PDFs and presentations accessible and compliant with international accessibility standards.
Accessibility means designing content that can be accessed by everyone, including people with disabilities. This includes individuals with visual, auditory, cognitive, and mobility impairments.
By making your PDFs accessible, you ensure that:
Proper document structure helps users with screen readers understand the flow of your content.
For every image, graphic, or figure in your PDF, include alt text that describes its content or purpose.
Ensure all text in your PDF is live (not an image of text) so it can be selected, searched, and read by assistive technologies. Avoid scanning your document as an image.
Ensure that text and background color combinations have enough contrast to be readable by users with low vision or color blindness.
Use a color contrast checker to verify that your contrast ratio meets the WCAG AA standards (minimum 4.5:1).
You may use the free and online WebAIM color contrast checker tool to see if your colors follow the accessibility standards
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker
Make sure links are descriptive so that users know where the link will take them.
Instead of “Click here,” use descriptive text like “Read the conference submission guidelines.”
Choose readable fonts and avoid overly decorative ones.
Ensure that text size can be resized without loss of content or functionality.
For longer documents, use bookmarks to help users navigate between sections easily.
Include metadata (e.g., document title, author, subject) so users know what the document contains.
Tagging ensures that the structure of your document is conveyed to screen readers.
Use tools like Adobe Acrobat’s built-in accessibility checker or online PDF accessibility checkers to verify that your document meets accessibility guidelines.
