Digital Accessibility

Clear and concise language makes content accessible to all users, including neurodiverse learners, multilingual readers, and anyone encountering complex topics. Prioritize readability and comprehension in every piece of content.

• Be Direct and Specific: Communicate one idea at a time. Avoid unnecessary jargon, technical terms, or complicated sentence structures. 
• Front-Load Key Information: Place the most important details at the beginning of sentences or paragraphs so readers can grasp the main point immediately. 
• Use Active Voice: Clearly indicate who is performing an action to reduce ambiguity and simplify comprehension. 
• Maintain Consistent Terminology: Use the same words for the same concepts throughout your content to avoid confusion. 
• Explain Unfamiliar Terms: Define specialized terms, abbreviations, or acronyms the first time they appear to ensure all readers understand their meaning. 
• Organize Logically: Structure content in a sequence that follows natural reasoning, grouping related ideas together for easier scanning and understanding. 

Acronyms can help simplify text, but they must be used thoughtfully to maintain clarity and accessibility for all readers.

• Spell Out the Full Term First: Introduce the full phrase before the acronym to ensure readers understand its meaning. Once established, use the acronym consistently throughout the content. This helps prevent confusion, especially for readers who are unfamiliar with the term or accessing the content via assistive technology. 

Example:

“Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA)”

Later: “The AODA requires…”

• Avoid Unnecessary Acronyms: Only use acronyms that are widely recognized or essential to reduce repetition. Rare or obscure acronyms can increase cognitive load and make the content harder to understand. 
• Maintain Consistency: Use the same acronym consistently for the same term across the content to avoid ambiguity and support comprehension for all users. 

When you want to convey urgency or importance, which formatting or styling would you use?

You might be using one of the following:

• Increase the font size
• Make it bold or italicized
• Change the color of the font
• **Add asterisks
• Underline the important words
• Highlight text with a background color

How Do We Emphasis Text for Everyone?

As visual users, we often rely on formatting like bold, italic, underline, highlight, or all caps to emphasize urgency or importance. But here’s the challenge: for someone using a screen reader, most of these formatting styles are invisible. By default, screen readers don’t announce if text is bolded or highlighted.

This means that while the visual impact might be clear to some, the message is completely lost for others. So, how do we emphasize text in a way that everyone can understand and engage with?

Formatting Alone Isn’t Enough

Avoid Using Formatting as the Only Way to Convey Meaning

• Formatting styles like highlighting, bold, italic, underline, and ALL CAPS should not be the sole method to emphasize or convey meaning.
• Combine formatting with explanatory text or visual cues (e.g., icons) to ensure your message is clear and accessible to all users.

Additional Best Practices for Text Formatting:

1. Use Sparingly: Formatting (Bold or Highlight) should complement clear language, not replace it.
2. Avoid Italics: Italicized text can be harder to read, especially for those with visual impairments or dyslexia.
3. Avoid Underlines: Underlined text can be mistaken for hyperlinks, causing confusion.
4. All-Caps Caution: Text in all caps is harder to read. All-caps text does not create recognizable word shapes; it appears as uniform, parallel lines. Using sentence cases preserves word shapes, which makes reading faster and easier.

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For Example:

Inaccessible Formatting:

• This is your assignment. You can either email a copy to your instructor or submit it by clicking on the 'Add Submission' button below. SUBMIT YOUR ASSIGNMENT BY FRIDAY AT 5 PM TO AVOID LATE PENALTIES.
• To enroll in your benefits, you must fill out the provided forms. You can submit them via the company portal or email HR directly. All employees must submit their benefits enrollment forms by October 15.

Accessible Formatting:

• This is your assignment. You can either email a copy to your instructor or submit it by clicking on the 'Add Submission' button below. Important deadline: Submit your assignment by Friday at 5 PM to avoid late penalties.

• To enroll in your benefits, you must fill out the forms provided. You can submit them via the company portal or email HR directly. Reminder/Please note: All employees must submit their benefits enrollment forms by October 15.

In this example: Bold and highlights are applied sparingly, drawing attention without overwhelming or confusing the reader. And there is text cue that says – “Important” or “Please Note”

This balance ensures that your message is clear to both visual users and those relying on assistive technologies. Simple and effective!