Manual Evaluations

How to Conduct a Manual Evaluation

A human review is needed to capture the context and meaning of many digital accessibility elements. This page includes many things you need to review that will not be identified by an accessibility checker.

Accessibility Checkers

Begin by running an accessibility checker on your document, website, course, etc. Follow the steps to rectify errors and warnings flagged by the checker. Below are commonly used accessibility checkers. 

Microsoft Office

This includes the commonly used Microsoft suite of Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.  

• Improve accessibility with the Accessibility Checker - Microsoft Support 
• You can also check accessibility while you work in Office apps

D2L Brightspace

Improve Your Course with Brightspace Accessibility Checker - Brightspace

PDFs

• Create and verify PDF accessibility, Acrobat Pro
• Learn about specific accessibility functions like tagging, forms, tables, etc. in the Acrobat Accessibility Series 

Human Edit

Do a visual inspection of the course, page, content, material and ask—did you:

• Use clear language that can be understood the first time
• Avoid jargon and define acronyms the first time
• Keep instructions short and direct
• Use high contrast colors
• Write meaningful links
• Avoid images of text
• Use meaningful headings consistently  
• Avoid using color alone to convey meaning
• Provide accurate, human edited captions and transcripts for audio/visual material
• Avoid PDFs (except as optional download)