Creating a Shareable Document that Demonstrates Universal Design for Learning Principles

Sometimes you want to create a document or presentation that can show your great content designs the employ principles of Universal Design for Learning and be able to share it with colleagues who may not be able to access your Learning Management System.  A PDF is a great way to do this. 

How do you accomplish this?

Word, PowerPoint, and many other Microsoft products feature the ability to save as PDF and preserve hyperlinks and other media (such as images).  If you format the documents, to include hyperlinks, they will remain active when the document is accessed via a machine with online connectivity. 

How can I do this with a web content document?  

In word, you can follow some simple steps.

1. Copy the text (and paste into a Word Document)
2. Be sure hyperlinks are included.
3. Add images (and be sure to add descriptions).
4. If you have embedded media, you can easily opt to add a screenshot of the embedded image (such as the video).  You can then add a description and a hyperlink in case the viewer chooses to select the image.
5. Use the Accessibility Checker to make sure the document is accessible.
6. Then save the file as a PDF while preserving formatting.

You should note that PowerPoint offers several similar options.

Now all you need is a little practice and you can create PDFs with hyperlinks to web-pages, as well as supplementary multimedia. You can email the files to students or colleagues. Finally, if you are emailing the content and using MS Outlook, you will have much of the same functionality as Word.  This means you could even compose the email message to include multiple representations of the content. You may notice that offering your content in more formats may increase the number of people who engage in your content. This is just an added perk of having a document to share that uses Universal Design for Learning Principles.