How to submit ADA accessible content to the San Francisco Bay Conservation & Development Commission

  1. Per Assembly Bill No. 434, all documents posted on the BCDC website must be accessible pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
  2. The Department of Rehabilitation (DOR) provides Resources for Creating Accessible Content.
  3. The DIAGRAM Center provides guidelines on making images accessible.
  4. Accessible materials are due to your BCDC representative a minimum of 72 hours in advance of the meeting or event.

BCDC is providing these templates for the public who would like to submit a letter, or presentation. Note that usage of the templates requires Microsoft Office which is not provided by BCDC.

Furthermore, the instructions below are useful for exhibits, presentations, and letters to achieve ADA compliance.

See how to make InDesign files ADA Compliant. The links for adding alternate text and mapping styles and tags will be most helpful.

Below are some general rules for alternative text:

  • Provide meaningful descriptions of any images
  • Develop alternative text for meaningful images. “Alternative text” is not a caption. Appropriate alternate text is a short description of an image that a screen reader can access and “read” to the user. Without alt text, the visually disabled user will miss the image and its meaning.
  • Describe complex images in the page content. For Complex images, alt text is not sufficient information. Describe in the text why the image is significant and what it demonstrates.
  • Summarize graphs and charts. Be sure the caption explains the purpose and provide a description of why the graph or chart is important and what it conveys.
  • Identify embedded multimedia with accessible text. Include a descriptive label for any audio, video, on page. Include text for any non-text content of the multimedia.

The Image Description Guidelines from the Diagram Center provide details and guidance to providing adequate descriptions.

For the drawing set, if you are laying the out in a program other than InDesign, it may be easiest to make the PDF ADA compliant in Acrobat.

Here are some basic instruction for how to make a PDF ADA compliant in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

For the color contrast, we understand the exhibits are often illustrative and it may be difficult to achieve the full contrast compliance as noted

We ask that you use contrasting colors for labels consistent with the guidelines, but the overall rendering of illustrative drawings may not meet the guidelines and will require additional resources for access which will be provided upon request.

For examples of ADA compliant exhibits, please download any of the exhibit pdfs available online and open them in Adobe Acrobat. Using the accessibility tools, you will be able to see the different ways the documents are configured with tags and alternate text. Some projects have short alt-text descriptions that were produced by an outside consultant while other project have extensive alt-text descriptions because the project team wrote them and compiled the pdf. Either way is an acceptable format as long as it meets the intent of the ADA.

More Resources

Microsoft Word

Microsoft PowerPoint