Publish documents and media on For government

Is your content suitable?

To publish on For government, your document, image or video must either:

• be of interest to all government employees, employees of multiple agencies, or members of a profession across Queensland Government (e.g. procurement)
• relate to a product or service Queensland Government agencies provide to each other.

How to prepare your content

When publishing your content, you must:

• clean it of sensitive or confusing information
• provide meta data that will make it easy to find
• make it accessible.

Clean your content

Before you publish content on For government, you must remove:

• tracked changes
• comments
• author name
• watermarks
• blank pages
• inside covers
• decorative images unrelated to the content.

Find and remove this content by accessing the metadata.

Clean your document in Microsoft Word

1. Select File > Info > Check for issues > Inspect document > Inspect.
2. Select Remove all for 'Comments, revisions and versions', and 'Document properties and personal information'.

Clean your document in Adobe Acrobat Pro

• Adobe Acrobat Pro: Select Tools > Protection > Hidden information > Sanitise document.
• Adobe Acrobat Pro DC: Select Tools > Redact (under Protect and Standardize) > Sanitise document.

See more about cleaning your documents

Make your content easy to find

Once your content is clean, you need to add new metadata. This will help your audiences find your content.

The minimum metadata requirements are:

• Title—the full title of your document (don't use the filename)
• Subject—a short description of the content and purpose of the document
• Author—your agency (don't use a person's name)
• Keywords—words and phrases that readers may search for to find your document (separate these with commas).

Add metadata by accessing the document properties in your program. You can find this under File in both Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat Pro.

See more about metadata

Make your content accessible

Your content must meet minimum accessibility requirements before being published.

Documents

Once you've cleaned your document and made it easy to find, complete an accessibility scan to check for issues.
Microsoft: Select File > Info > Check for issues > Check accessibility.
Adobe: Select Tools > Accessibility > Accessibility check > Start checking.

Fix any issues the accessibility scan finds.

Create accessible Microsoft Word documents

Create accessible Adobe PDFs

Tables

When displaying content in a table, you must:

• have meaningful column headings—set the first row as 'header row'.
• use a simple table layout—don't have tables within tables and don't split columns or rows.
• not use your table as the page layout—split complex tables into smaller, simpler tables.

Images

You must support image, graphics and charts with text alternatives (ALT text). Readers using assistive technology rely on this to understand graphics on a page.

When writing text alternatives, you must:

• describe the image specifically
• be succinct
• not include 'image of' or 'picture of'.

Video

You must embed captions or provide a supporting transcript for your videos. You can add captions to a video by using a variety of software and platforms. If you're hosting your video on Vimeo and YouTube, they have this functionality built in. If you're not adding captions, you'll need to publish a transcript directly below the video.

See more about making your multimedia accessible

Find out more

Queensland government guide

QGov online web writing and style guide

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guides

How to meet WCAG 2.0

General techniques for WCAG 2.0

PDF techniques for WCAG 2.0

UK Government guides

Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility