Minot State / Accessibility / Documents
Accessibility Portal

Documents

In an effort to comply with ongoing accessibility work at MSU, existing documents (PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX) used across MSU websites need to be tested and changes made if a document does not meet digital accessibility standards. Emails are currently being sent out with links to documents associated with each MSU website. Items on this list are untested at this stage, and you will need to verify the accessibility of each document that you wish to keep online. A range of options are available to you if a document doesn't pass accessibility checking:

  1. Delete the document. Many documents so far have been found to be orphans that are no longer linked to any page of a site or are simply no longer needed.
      
  2. Keep the document and remediate the accessibility issues.
    1. If the document is a form, additional considerations will be needed.
    2. If the document is constructed from scans, photographs, or screenshots, an alt tag is not sufficient. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) should be used to make the contained text selectable and readable to screen readers. After OCR, the normal PDF accessibility rules for tables, reading order, and etc. still apply.
    3. Remediation for large, complicated documents may not be feasible.
        
  3. Rework the documents content to be part of an existing or a new HTML page of the website.
      
  4. Move internal faculty and staff use documents to a Microsoft Teams channel behind a NDUS login and password.
      
  5. Documents that are archival, published online prior to April 24, 2026, and it will not change going forward can be placed in our new archive. This option makes use of the exception for preexisting conventional electronic documents.
      
  6. Documents originating from a third-party source should be replaced with a direct link to the copy of the document on the third-party's website.
      
  7. Temporarily remove the document before the April 24, 2026 deadline and repost a remediated copy when time permits.
      
  8. PDF files can be replaced with Microsoft Office documents. The accessibility checker in Microsoft products is currently less strict, but additional document checking exists in Blackboard and product for the website will be coming soon.

Checking accessibility and remediating documents

For PDF files, Acrobat Pro is available to all fulltime faculty and staff. If you do not have a copy, put a workorder request in with ITC. 

For Microsoft Office products an Accessibility Checker is built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.