Dear Sherry,

I just got a new printer that also allows me to scan documents to a PDF. This is a cool feature that is so easy to use. Before I dive into scanning all my materials, is there anything I should know before or be thinking about? Can I scan any document I want (handwritten, typed, copyright material, etc.) and post it in my Moodle course as a PDF?

Yours Truly,

Print and Scan Fanatic

Dear Print and Scan Fanatic,

Congrats on your new printer, and I’m so glad you asked about scanning your materials. The answer is no, and here’s why.

Scanned documents are treated like image files and therefore cannot be read by assistive technologies, such as a screen reader or text-to-speech apps, the page will appear blank to the technology.

Copyright is another consideration to address before deciding to scan certain documents.

Here are some tips to follow:

For handwritten material:

• Type your information in Word.
• Apply proper headings, alt tags and descriptions to graphics.
• Properly identify links in the document.
• Run the accessibility checker to find any outstanding issues.

When your document is ready, you can post it in Moodle, save it as a Google doc and provide a link to the file, or even save it as a PDF and post it in your course.

For typed materials (articles, receipts, paper tests, etc.):

• Provide links to the original articles and practice tests if possible.

If you need to scan something smaller, like a receipt, or label, etc., try inserting it into a Word document where you can provide a bit of surrounding text to represent what is being captured in the graphical image and where you will also have the ability to add descriptive text to the image or a caption that will be read by a screen reader.