How to Make an ADA Compliant Word Document

By Tania Brenes-Arguedas and Andrew Daigle
The Communicator: Volume 7, Issue 1, February 2026

As many of you may have heard, the U.S. Department of Justice issued new ADA Title II regulations in 2024 for state and local governments, including public universities, mandating that their web content and mobile apps be accessible to people with disabilities by meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards by April 2026.

The NPDN websites and resources will be subject to this requirement. To that end the NPDN IT department will begin evaluating resources already posted on the NPDN website. Moving forward, the NPDN IT team and the NPDN Communication & Outreach Committee will also begin ensuring that all new resources that are posted in the NPDN website are ADA compliant.

What you need to know:
If you are submitting information to post on the NPDN website (including content to be published in the Communicator) make sure it is ADA compliant.

How? The first step is to learn to make your Word documents ADA compliant. There are many videos online that help you do this. For example, check out this video that explains how to make a word document ADA compliant.

What about pdfs? Those are harder. Moving forward we are going to discourage posting new pdf’s in the NPDN website. But learning to do ADA compliant word documents can also help if you really need a pdf. One way to make a compliant pdf is to make an ADA compliant word document and publish to PDF. Be sure to test the final pdf for compliance afterwards. You can use a screen reader like Apple Voice Over, or Widows NVDA or JAWS. Here is a good guideline on checking PDFs for accessibility.