Tony Gebhard

Let’s get something out of the way right up front.

If you’ve heard the words “universal design” lately and immediately braced for a political argument, I get it. The whole DEI conversation has gotten so loud and so toxic that even genuinely good ideas are getting dragged into the mud. People hear “inclusion” and they shut down before the sentence is even finished. That’s where we are right now, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But here’s the thing — universal design isn’t a political statement. It never was. It’s an engineering principle. It’s a practical framework. And when it comes to digital content, it’s the difference between information that actually reaches people and information that disappears into a void because somebody couldn’t use it.

I’m Tony Gebhard. I’m totally blind. I’ve worked in assistive technology for years, and I’ve watched screen reader users — people using tools like NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver — run headfirst into walls that didn’t need to exist. A Word document with no heading structure. A PDF that’s just a scanned image. A website photo with no description. These aren’t political failures. They’re design failures. And they’re fixable.

So let’s strip the jargon, forget the culture war noise, and talk about what universal design actually means — and more importantly, what you can do about it today.

What Universal Design Actually Is

Universal design is the idea that things should work for the widest possible range of people from the start, not as an afterthought. The classic physical example is the curb cut — those little ramps at intersections. They were designed for wheelchair users, but they also help people with strollers, delivery drivers with hand trucks, cyclists, and pretty much anyone who’s ever had their hands full. Nobody suffers because the curb has a ramp. Everyone benefits to some degree.

Digital content works the same way. When you write a document with proper heading structure, a screen reader user can navigate it easily. So can someone skimming on their phone. So can someone with a reading disability who needs to jump between sections. So can someone who just got to the end of a long report and needs to find that one statistic again. The heading structure helps everybody.

That’s the core of it. Accessible design isn’t charity. It’s just better design.

And when you consider that roughly 1 in 4 adults in the United States lives with some form of disability — and that aging affects vision, hearing, motor function, and cognition for nearly everyone eventually — designing for accessibility isn’t a niche consideration. It’s designing for real life.

Who We’re Talking About: Low Vision and Blind Users

Before we get to the tips, let me give you a quick picture of who we’re designing for when we talk about visual accessibility specifically.

Totally blind users rely entirely on screen readers — software that reads the content of a screen aloud or sends it to a braille display. The three most common screen readers are:

• NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) — Free, open-source, and widely used on Windows. If you want to test your content for accessibility without spending a dime, download NVDA and try navigating your document with your monitor off.
• JAWS (Job Access With Speech) — The industry standard in many professional and vocational rehab settings. Powerful, feature-rich, and expensive.
• VoiceOver — Built into every Apple device, from the iPhone to the Mac. No download required. If you’re on a Mac, it’s already there.

Low vision users may use screen magnification tools like ZoomText or the built-in magnifier in Windows and macOS. They might use high contrast modes, large print, or a combination of magnification and screen reader. Their needs overlap with blind users in some areas and diverge in others — contrast and color matter a lot for low vision users in ways they don’t for someone using a screen reader exclusively.

The point: these aren’t hypothetical users. They’re real people trying to read your documents, navigate your websites, and access your information. Here’s how you make that work.

10 Tips for Creating Accessible Content

Tip 1: Use Real Heading Structure in Word Documents

This is the single highest-impact change most people can make. When you create a Word document and just make text bigger or bold to indicate a section header, that’s visual formatting only. A screen reader has no idea it’s a heading. It reads it as regular paragraph text, and the person navigating the document can’t jump between sections.

How to do it: In Microsoft Word, use the Styles panel in the Home ribbon. Select your section title text and apply Heading 1, Heading 2, or Heading 3 from the Styles gallery — don’t just manually bold and resize. Heading 1 is your main title, Heading 2 is a major section, Heading 3 is a subsection within that. Keep the hierarchy logical. Don’t skip from Heading 1 to Heading 3 without a Heading 2 in between.

Screen reader users can pull up a list of all headings in a document and jump directly to any of them. With proper heading structure, a 40-page report becomes navigable. Without it, it’s a wall of text.

Tip 2: Write Meaningful Alt Text for Every Image

Alt text — alternative text — is a written description of an image that screen readers read aloud when a sighted person would see the image. If you post a photo and leave the alt text blank, a screen reader says “image” and moves on. The person using it gets nothing.

How to do it in Word: Right-click on an image, select “Edit Alt Text,” and type a description in the Alt Text panel that appears. Be descriptive and specific. If it’s a photo of a presenter at a conference holding a microphone with an audience in the background, say that. Don’t just say “photo.” If an image is purely decorative — a design flourish with no informational value — you can mark it as decorative so screen readers skip it entirely.

For websites: Every <img> tag should have an alt attribute. In WordPress, you can add alt text in the image block settings or in the media library.

What makes good alt text: Describe what matters. For a graph, describe the trend, not just “bar chart.” For a headshot, describe the person and context. For a logo, state the organization name. Keep it concise but complete — a sentence or two is usually right.

Tip 3: Make PDFs Actually Accessible (Not Just “Saved as PDF”

Here’s a hard truth: most PDFs are accessibility disasters. Saving a Word document as PDF doesn’t automatically make it accessible. Scanning a paper document to PDF creates what’s called an “image PDF” — it looks like text, but it’s actually just a picture, and a screen reader reads exactly zero of it.

For Word-to-PDF exports: Start with an accessible Word document (heading structure, alt text, proper reading order). Then use File > Save As > PDF, and in the options, check “Document structure tags for accessibility.” This carries your heading and tag structure into the PDF.

For scanned documents: You need OCR — Optical Character Recognition — to convert the image to actual text. Adobe Acrobat Pro can run OCR and tag the resulting content. It’s not perfect, but it’s dramatically better than nothing.

To check a PDF: Adobe Acrobat Pro has a built-in accessibility checker under Tools > Accessibility. It flags missing alt text, untagged content, reading order issues, and more. Run it before you publish anything.

Tip 4: Use Descriptive Hyperlink Text

How many times have you written “click here” as a link? Stop doing that. Screen reader users can pull up a list of all links on a page or document, and if every link says “click here” or “read more,” that list is completely useless.

How to do it: Make the link text describe where it goes or what it does. Instead of “Click here to download the report,” write “Download the 2024 Annual Report.” Instead of “Learn more,” write “Learn more about NVDA keyboard shortcuts.” The link text should make sense on its own, out of context.

This also improves SEO, so it’s a win even if you’re not thinking about accessibility.

Tip 5: Don’t Rely on Color Alone to Convey Information

If your document or infographic uses color to communicate something — red for bad, green for good, blue for one category, orange for another — you’ve excluded colorblind users and anyone who can’t see the colors accurately. About 8% of men have some form of color vision deficiency. That’s a lot of people.

How to do it: Add a second indicator. Use both color and a label, icon, or pattern. A status column that says “Complete” in green text is more accessible than a green dot alone. A chart that uses different line patterns in addition to different colors is more accessible than colors alone. Always pair color with something else.

Tip 6: Structure Tables Properly

Tables in documents and on websites can be completely impenetrable to screen reader users if they’re not built correctly. Screen readers navigate tables cell by cell, and without proper header markup, a complex table becomes a stream of numbers with no context.

In Word: Create your table, then right-click on the header row and go to Table Properties > Row, and check “Repeat as header row at the top of each page.” This tells screen readers which row contains the headers and associates those headers with the data cells below them.

In HTML: Use <th> elements for header cells, not just <td>. Add a scope attribute (scope="col" or scope="row") to clarify what the header applies to. Don’t use tables for layout — only for actual tabular data.

Tip 7: Keep Sufficient Color Contrast

Low vision users need strong contrast between text and background. Light gray text on a white background might look sleek and minimal to a designer. To someone with low vision, it might be completely unreadable.

The standard: WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) recommends a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. This isn’t arbitrary — it’s based on actual research about what people with low vision can distinguish.

How to check: Use the free WebAIM Contrast Checker at webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker. Plug in your text color and background color and it tells you whether you pass. There are also browser extensions and design tools that check contrast automatically. No excuses for guessing.

Tip 8: Use Plain Language

Accessibility isn’t only about screen readers and contrast ratios. It’s also about whether people can actually understand what you’ve written. Plain language matters for people with cognitive disabilities, people who aren’t native speakers of your language, people with lower literacy levels, and honestly everyone else too.

How to do it: Write shorter sentences. Use common words when a simpler word does the same job. Explain acronyms on first use. Break up dense paragraphs. Use active voice instead of passive (“We reviewed the application” instead of “The application was reviewed”). The goal is clarity, not dumbing anything down.

Microsoft Word has a built-in readability score under File > Options > Proofing. Turn it on and you’ll get a Flesch-Kincaid reading level every time you run spell check. Aim for a score that matches your actual audience.

Tip 9: Provide Captions and Transcripts for Audio and Video

If you’re putting video or audio content out into the world — podcast, webinar, YouTube video, training recording — you need captions or a transcript. Deaf and hard-of-hearing users can’t access audio content without them. Neither can someone in a noisy environment, someone whose first language isn’t English, or someone who just learns better by reading.

For video: YouTube auto-generates captions and they’ve gotten reasonably good, but always review and correct them before publishing. AI tools like Descript, Otter.ai, and Rev can produce transcripts that you edit and attach. Captions should be synchronized, accurate, and include speaker identification and sound effects where relevant.

For podcasts: A written transcript posted on your episode page covers both accessibility and SEO. It’s work, but it’s worth it. Your content reaches more people, and search engines can actually index it.

Tip 10: Test With an Actual Screen Reader

All the theory in the world doesn’t replace actually running your content through a screen reader. It takes maybe ten minutes, and you will immediately find things you would never have caught otherwise.

How to get started:

• NVDA: Free download at nvaccess.org. Press NVDA+Space to switch between browse mode and focus mode. Use H to jump between headings, Tab to navigate interactive elements, and Ctrl+Home to go to the top of a document.
• VoiceOver on Mac: Press Command+F5 to turn it on. Use VO+U to open the Rotor, which gives you lists of headings, links, and other elements on the page.
• VoiceOver on iPhone: Go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver and turn it on. Swipe right to navigate forward, double-tap to activate.

Turn off or cover your monitor. Navigate your own document or webpage using only the keyboard and audio output. Notice what’s confusing, what’s missing, and what breaks. That experience will teach you more than any checklist.

The Bottom Line

Universal design isn’t about politics. It’s not about compliance theater or checking boxes to avoid a lawsuit. It’s about building things that actually work for the actual range of people who will use them.

The blind person trying to read your annual report with NVDA. The low-vision employee straining to read your light-gray-on-white slide deck. The Deaf attendee who wanted to watch your webinar but had no captions. These are real people, and the barriers they hit aren’t inevitable — they’re just bad design choices that nobody thought to question.

You don’t have to do all ten of these things tomorrow. Pick one. Maybe it’s alt text. Maybe it’s heading structure. Maybe it’s running your next document through the Word accessibility checker before you send it. Start somewhere, build the habit, and let it grow from there.

Accessible content is better content. For everyone.

Stay groovy.

— Tony