It is important to ensure that information is available in a range of formats and is easy to understand. This will help organisations to provide a high standard of customer service and meet their obligations under the Prevention of Discrimination Ordinance, Guernsey 2022.
All written content, including websites, forms, leaflets, letters, and emails work for everyone. The people who need them the most are often the people who find them hardest to use.
Making your content accessible means making sure it can be used by as many people as possible.
This includes those with:
- Impaired vision.
- Motor difficulties.
- Cognitive impairments or learning disabilities.
- Deafness or impaired hearing.
Make your content clear and simple enough so that most people can use it without needing to adapt it, while supporting those who do need to.
For example, someone with impaired vision might use a screen reader (software that lets a user navigate a website and 'read out' the content), braille display or screen magnifier when accessing websites or reading email. Someone with motor difficulties might use a special mouse, speech recognition software, or on-screen keyboard emulator.
Use clear and simple language.
- Avoid using unnecessarily complex words and phrases.
- Simple language makes your document accessible to people with cognitive impairments, learning disabilities, or impaired language skills. Most users prefer simple language, including specialist audiences. This helps users to understand and process information quickly.
- Tips:
- Think about your 'customer' the recipient of the information/ letter and making the message you are giving as clear as you can. Less is almost certainly more.
- Be approachable, you can be approachable and still be professional.
- Read it again. How would you feel if you received the information as it is written?
- When statutory or legal stuff needs to be included, make sure the words around are plain English.
- Where you need to use technical terms, abbreviations, or acronyms, explain what they mean the first time you use them. For example, States of Guernsey (SoG).
- Consider providing a glossary for terms readers may not know.
Keep the formatting and structure simple.
- Don't make your content unnecessarily complex and avoid large blocks of text. Take care to make sure your headings are informative and use bullet points to split information into manageable chunks.
- Tips:
- Keep sentences and paragraphs short, around 25 words or less per sentence.
- Break up long text with headings and subheadings.
- Keep to a minimum font size of 12pt text for written documents and emails (16px for websites or any type of online content).
- Use sentence case. Avoid ALL CAPS and italics.
- Use bold for emphasis.
- Make sure the text is left aligned, not justified.
- Avoid underlining, except for links.
- Use generous line spacing to maximise readability (line spacing 1.15 where possible, but 1 is okay).
- Use list formatting (bullet points, numbered lists) as appropriate.
- Avoid the use of hyphenation in your text as these can be inaccessible to some readers.
- Consider using images, illustrations, video, audio, and symbols to help clarify meaning.
- When posting a video online, make sure it has subtitles, and that the subtitles are of a suitable font size of 16px or more.
- Give your writing plenty of room. Try to avoid cramming large amounts of text into small spaces. Instead, review the content to look at how it could be reduced.
Use the accessibility function on your computer to advise on any changes to improve accessibility.
- If you are using Microsoft then information on how to change your computer's accessibility setting can be found on Microsoft's Learning Center website.
Accessible fonts
- Certain fonts are more accessible such as:
- Calibri
- Aerial
- Times new roman
- Helvetica
- For more information see this blog. A Web Designer's Complete Guide to Accessible Fonts (accessibilitychecker.org)
Provide links in context.
- Make sure all links are provided in context, at the point in the content at which they're useful. Do not use something generic like 'click here' or 'more'.
- For example:
- "More information on training can be found within the disability awareness training page"
- Is better than,
- "More information on training can be found here."
- Generic links do not make sense out of context or tell users where a link will take them. They also do not work for people using screen readers, who often scan through a list of links to navigate a page.
- It's important the links are descriptive, so they make sense in isolation.
Contrast and colour use are vital to accessibility.
- Poor colour contrast makes text difficult to read - especially for visually impaired people.
- Make sure your colour choices for overlaying text onto images, logos, and backgrounds are as accessible as possible by checking the contrast ratio. There are free tools online to help you with this, including Adobe's Color Contrast Analyzer and WebAIM's Contrast Checker.
- When putting images on a webpage, consider that some people will choose to use a 'dark mode' on their web browser. This mode inverts the colour scheme of their browser, including turning a white background into a black background and black text, into white text. This is often beneficial to those with low vision and light sensitivity. Make sure the contrast you chose also works well in this mode.
Images
- Don't rely heavily on imagery, use tags and captions as opportunities to describe imagery. Where possible, make sure images say what they are when you hover over them. This is important for users who cannot see them and may be using a screen reader.
- Avoid placing text over images, particularly 'busy' images with a lot going. Avoid placing text across backgrounds with two or more colours.
Avoid PDFs unless absolutely necessary.
- Unless created with sufficient care, PDFs can be bad for accessibility, for example they do not work well with assistive technologies like screen readers.
- The accessibility of a PDF depends on how it was created. It needs to have a logical structure based on tags and headings, meaningful document properties, readable body text, good colour contrast and text alternatives for images. It takes time to do this properly.
- Even if this work is done according to best practice, there's still no guarantee that PDF content will meet the accessibility needs of users and their technology. Operating systems, browsers and devices all work slightly differently and so do the wide variety of assistive technologies such as screen readers, magnifiers and literacy software.
- Some users need to change browser settings such as colours and text size to make web content easier to read. It's difficult to do this for content in PDFs. You can magnify the file but the words might not wrap and the font might pixelate, which makes for a poor user experience. Locking content into a PDF limits the ability for people to make these kind of accessibility customisations.
- PDFs should only be published online if it's a document which was designed to be printed and read on paper, for example, a promotional material, a booklet, or a leaflet.
- If you can't avoid creating a PDF, ideally it should be in addition to a version written on your webpage. You can include a link or use a QR code to link to the webpage.
- You must also make sure that the PDF is named appropriately, telling the user what the document is.
Contact options
- It is good practice to offer different ways for people to get in touch with you. This might be email, text, phone call or by writing.
