Articles and Research

Accessible Letterhead Mistakes You’re Probably Making

Letterhead may be designed to lock in an organization’s branding, but it can also lock meaningful information away from screen reader users. When logos, contact information, board listings, and hyperlinks are placed in Microsoft Word’s header or footer, important content may disappear from the reading order and links can create untagged annotation errors in the exported PDF. In this episode of Chax Chat, Dax Castro and Chad Chelius explore what accessible letterhead should contain, why a flattened image is not a reliable solution, and how to decide where letterhead information belongs in the reading order. They also discuss live text, repeated links, first-page treatment, efficient heading navigation, and when bookmarks provide a better experience than trying to make a PDF behave like a website.