Why is accessibility important?
It's inclusive and provides equal access to everyone, especially people with disabilities. It promotes usability. It's the right thing to do. It's the law.
Top tips for accessible communications
Make sure information and text are clear and easy to read and understand. Write in plain English and use short, succinct sentences. The national NHS website provides useful guidance on creating a highly usable and accessible GP website for patients. Much of this advice can be applied to your own website and other communications content. Generally speaking it is recommended you:
- use Arial font, size 12 if you're using a word document intended to be shared
- don’t underline words, use italics or write in CAPITALS
- don’t use complicated words or figures of speech
- use ‘paste special’ and ‘unformatted’ when copying text from other sources onto your website
Make sure hyperlinks are clear. When you hyperlink to a website, make sure the group of words in the link accurately describe the destination and make sense as a standalone phrase. People who use screen readers have the facility to access a list of all the links in a document and use these to navigate to something else. An example of a good link would be, ‘You can follow Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System on Twitter for updates’. Whereas ‘Click here to follow us on Twitter’ is not helpful because the link does not describe where they are going to when pressing click.
Check that the layout is easy to follow. Avoid large blocks of text as this can be hard to follow. Use left-aligned text with a short line width and don’t justify text, because it can be more difficult to read extra space between words.
Describe images and use Alt Text. If you’re using images, make sure you provide alternative text (Alt Text) that describes the image. Most social media platforms will offer the option of adding Alt Text at the point of uploading. Avoid sharing images with lots of words on as this will be inaccessible to screen readers. If there is text in an image make sure you include that in the Alt Text.
Consider your use of colours. Colours can make text images and text easier to understand but, if you use a poor choice of colour contrast, this can make the text difficult to read. You can find out which colours are accessible by using the Web Aim Contrast Checker. It is also important to remember that some people can’t distinguish colours, so don’t rely on colour to communicate information.
Provide captions and transcript for video. If you are using video content you need to provide captions that accurately reflect the content. This is important firstly for accessibility and also for the fact that a lot of video content is consumed with the sound off. Many social media platforms provide a tool for adding captions automatically but you will need to check that these are accurate and, if not, manually update them. Many free or low-cost video editing software packages also offer tools to caption your videos. Be careful when using PDFs.PDF documents can be difficult to customise and, therefore, make accessible. An easy way to make PDF documents accessible is to start with a Microsoft Word document and then save as a PDF. The NHS Digital Service Manual have developed the following guidance on how to make PDFs more accessible.
Use an accessibility checker or seek guidance. Some software packages such as Microsoft Office have built-in accessibility checkers that you can use to check accessibility.
To access these in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, select File> Check for issues> Check Accessibility. For PDFs, you can use the Acrobat accessibility checker.
Tap into audience insight. It is also good practice to test documents for accessibility with disabled users before publishing. Observing how users are accessing or trying to access content will give you a real understanding of the sort of accessibility issues they experience.