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Best practices for writing accessible content

A number of copywriting best practices ensure accessible content at the most basic level.

Adopt a simple writing style

A simple writing style makes your content easier to follow and understand. Among the techniques you can apply are:
Unambiguous words
Avoid words that have multiple meanings in favor of synonyms that have one meaning.
Short sentences
Keep your sentences short, about 15-20 words long. Avoid relative clauses.
Short paragraphs
Keep each paragraph short, no more than about 5 lines or so.

Consider following an official style guide, such as the Microsoft Writing Style Guide, to help you develop a good writing style, as well as a consistent one across all content authors and editors in your organization.

Key points first, details later

At any level of your piece of content, follow the general rule that the most important information goes first. Whether you're writing an entire document or a single paragraph, always put your key information at the start. Don't bury key information in the middle or bottom of the page or paragraph. If you put key points first, your readers can rely on the fact that if they abandon reading your content at any point, they'll have received the maximum amount of relevant information possible.

Make your titles short, descriptive and unique

Your organization may help you optimize your titles, but at least some of the responsibility for producing good titles falls on you, the author or editor.

Any content you produce must have a title, and ideally, such a title meets the following requirements:
Short
Keeping your titles short and focused helps your visitors understand what the content is about. Your organization may help you achieve this goal by purposely limiting the maximum length of your titles.
Descriptive
Your title must convey what the content is about, and more specifically, what the reader can expect to learn from continuing to read the content. A title can be seen as a decision point for your visitor: if the title describes content that the readers needs, they will proceed; if it describes content that the reader doesn't need, they will go elsewhere.
Unique
If the website contains two or more pieces of content with the same title, it's harder for your visitors to know which is which. For this reason, ensure that your title is unique. Your organization may help you achieve this goal by forcing your title to be unique.

Divide your content into chunks

If you divide your content into bite-sized pieces, a technique also referred to as chunking, your text becomes more readable and understandable.

Do not write your content as a wall of text. Instead, organize your content into well-defined chunks.

Your organization already uses Schemas to force your content into a fixed structure, to a certain degree.

But even within that structure, you yourself can and should still organize large pieces of content into chunks, using a variety of techniques, in order to improve readability:
  • Divide your text into chunks, and give each chunk a heading that, like the title of your overall piece of content, is short, descriptive and unique.
  • Whenever your text enumerates or lists something, present such content in the form of an actual list, either a numbered list (if the order of the list items matters) or a bullet list (if the order doesn't matter).
  • Use other techniques to visually organize your content to match its semantic organization. Tables are a good example of such visual-semantic organization.

All of these techniques help make the document structure as obvious as possible to someone using a screen reader.

Define initialisms, acronyms and abbreviations when you mention them for the first time

The use of initialisms, acronyms and abbreviations make your text easier to write and read, but only if your website visitors understand what they stand for. For that reason, spell them out when you use them for the first time in your text.

Your copy many contain several types of shortened text:
TermMeaning
InitialismAn initialism is a string of text made from the first letter or letters of a phrase. For example, "WCAG" is an initialism for "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines."
AcronymAn acronym is an initialism that is intended to be pronounced as if it's a word in its own right. For example, "NASA" is pronounced as a word, rather than by spelling out its letters.
AbbreviationAn abbreviation is a word with some of its letters removed to make it shorter. For example, "adj." is an abbreviation of "adjective," and "Rd" is an abbreviation of "Road."

For all these types of shortened text, explain what they stand for when you first mention them in your text.

For example, rewrite the following:

"Always strive to create contact that adheres to the WCAG."

to

"Always strive to create contact that adheres to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG for short."

Avoid nonstandard formatting for emphasis

Don't emphasize part of your text by using all-caps text, words with spaces between letters, or other nonstandard formatting. Use WCAG-compliant emphasis elements.

Many website visitors with no vison to low vision interact with the web using screen readers. Screen readers read out loud what is on the screen. Screen readers may read all-caps text letter by letter (for example, "IMPORTANT"), because they assume the text is an initialism. The same goes for text written with spacing (for example, "I M P O R T A N T").

To ensure that screen readers read your text correctly, use normal emphasis-marking formatting, such as italic formatting ("important") or bold formatting ("bold").