Text and Accessibility
After designing our content to be accessible, we have to make sure that the content itself is accessible. The most common presented content on web is text. So, how do we make text accessible?
This section covers the basic concepts behind text content accessibility, from making text easier to read to text styling and using hyperlinks the proper way.
Reading Level
Content should be written as clearly and simply as possible. Ensure that additional content is available to aid the understanding of difficult or complex text.
Text difficulty is described in terms of the level of education required to read the text.
Supplemental content is required when text demands reading ability more advanced than the lower secondary education level — that is, more than nine years of school.
Text that uses short, common words and short sentences is easier to decode and usually requires less advanced reading ability than text that uses long sentences and long or unfamiliar words.
Providing a Text Summary
A text summary provides a short statement of the most important ideas and information in the content. The summary is easier to read because it uses shorter sentences and more common words than the original.
The following steps can be used to prepare the summary
- Identify the most important ideas and information in the content.
- Write one or more paragraphs that use shorter sentences and more common words to express the same ideas and information.
The number of paragraphs depends on the length of the original
- Measure the readability of the summary.
- Edit the summary. Consider dividing longer sentences into two or replacing long or unfamiliar words with shorter, more common terms.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 as needed.
Making Text Easier to Read
Users with disabilities that make it difficult to decode words and sentences are likely to have trouble reading and understanding complex text.
In order to reduce the complexity of the text
- Develop a single topic or subtopic per paragraph.
- Use the simplest sentence forms consistent with the purpose of the content.
- Use sentences that are no longer than the typical accepted length for secondary education.
- Consider dividing longer sentences into two.
- Use sentences that contain no more than two conjunctions.
- Indicate logical relationships between phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or sections of the text.
- Avoid professional jargon, slang, and other terms with a specialized meaning that may not be clear to people.
- Replace long or unfamiliar words with shorter, more common terms.
- Remove redundant words, that is, words that do not change the meaning of the sentence.
- Use single nouns or short noun-phrases.
- Remove complex words or phrases that could be replaced with more commonly used words without changing the meaning of the sentence.
- Use bulleted or numbered lists instead of paragraphs that contain long series of words or phrases separated by commas.
- Make clear pronoun references and references to other points in the document.
- Use the active voice for documents written in English and some other Western languages, unless there is a specific reason for using passive constructions. Sentences in the active voice are often shorter and easier to understand than those in the passive voice.
- Use verb tenses consistently.
- Use names and labels consistently.
For example, the simplest sentence-form for English consists of Subject-Verb-Object, as in John hit the ball.
In English that is 25 words.
If the text does not require reading ability more advanced than the lower secondary education level, no supplements or alternative versions are needed.
Spoken version of text
Some users who have difficulty sounding out (decoding) words in written text find it very helpful to hear the text read aloud.
This service can now be provided easily using either recorded human speech or synthetic speech.
There are a number of products that authors can use to convert text to synthetic speech and then save the spoken version as an audio file. A link to the spoken version can then be provided within the content.
There is also a server-based tool, which converts text to audio on the fly (upon user request). This tool though, should be implemented on the websites functionality.
Note to Developers
Server-based methods may be best when pages change often or when user choice determines text content. Some server-based tools allow users to select any text they are interested in and listen to it. Typically, the user presses a button which starts the text-to-speech conversion and reads the text aloud.
Text Styling
What to Avoid
Here is a quick list of what should be avoided when styling text content:
- Avoid centrally aligned text
- Avoiding chunks of italic text
- Avoiding overuse of different styles on individual pages and in sites
- Avoid applying text styling to text characters within a word
Underlined Text
Underlined text is the default style of links, so users can easily distinguish between plain text and a link. Therefore, by underlining text that is not meant to be used as a link, will most likely confuse users.
If a text needs to be highlighted, it is more suited to make it Bold.
Applying the Bold effect from within the Editor, will most likely surround the text with the Strong HTML attribute, which is the semantically correct way of giving emphasis to text.
Numbers Representation
Write numbers “1-9” using words, not numerical figures. Anything “10+” can be written in numbers.
Links
Proper Format of Links
Describe the purpose of a link in the text of the link. The description lets a user distinguish this link from links in the Web page that lead to other destinations and helps the user determine whether to follow the link.
For example:
Let’s say that you want to add a link so people can visit a web page, which shows the current routes at Boulders Climbing Gym.
The correct way
Inserting a link through a text editor.
Coding a link in html.
Visit the <a href="routes.html">Current routes at Boulders Climbing Gym</a>.
The wrong way
Current routes at Boulders Climbing Gym: <a href="routes.html">Visit Website</a>.
Grouping Links
Sometimes the need of having more than one link separated by the main content arises, thus menus are being created. A menu basically is a group of options presented to the user.
The wrong way to present links
When working with a text editor it is very easy and tempting to just write the plain text of each of our links, then separate them by a symbol and just convert the plain text to links.
Here is an example of creating a simple menu the wrong way
Home | About Us | Contact Us
While this is visually appealing, there is no explicit indication that this is actually a menu. It is just some links separated by text and it's the same as if we had some links inside a block of text.
Grouping links the right way
So what is actually a menu? You could think of a menu as a list of items. In this case a list of links. Therefore, converting your links into an unordered list so you can form a menu is not only semantically correct but also more accessible.
Let's see how we would present the links of the previous example, the correct way.
- Home
- About Us
- Contact Us
More details about lists.
Color for Links
Blue colored links (#3333FF) in black text is recommended, because it is affected very little by red and green color blindness like Protanopia and Deuteranopia.
For example, this is a blue link in black text.
