Leave no one behind: why writing for accessibility matters

You’ve spent months doing user research for your product.

You understand your market and you know exactly who you’re targeting, what they’re looking for, and how to reach them.

Here’s the catch: no matter how thoroughly you know your audience or how perfect your messages are, you’ll still miss out on over 10% of them if you aren’t working with accessibility in mind.

In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated one in seven people worldwide – that’s 14.3% – live with a disability. In 2012, Statistics Canada dug into the same question within our borders and found that approximately 13.7% of our population report their daily lives are limited in one way or another due to a disability.

(Read the World Health Organization’s World Report on Disability, or Statistics Canada’s Canadian Survey on Disability)

Accessibility affects so many people, so it’s kind of a big deal… but it’s not always top-of-mind when we’re putting together content for that website, blog, email, program, or app. It’s the type of thing we pass off to our graphic designers and web developers without a second thought.

But, it turns out, writing has a heck of a lot to do with helping people read and understand our messages, and there are tons of ways good content can help improve things. And here’s the coolest part: when we put accessibility at the forefront, it actually makes usability easier for everybody.

First, let’s take a look at the barriers

The A11y Project is a group of web designers committed to making the internet a more inclusive place. They outline four categories where accessibility matters most:

Visual: This can be non-sighted users, users with low-vision, users with obstructed vision, or even simply your aging parents.

Auditory: The web is a visual medium, but captions and fallbacks for sound-necessary media need to be considered for hearing impaired users.

Motor: People with motor impairments typically use a wide range of assistive technology from specialized keyboards, to eye trackers, to using single buttons to navigate their computer.

Cognitive: Relates to the ease of processing information.

That doesn’t just cover permanent disabilities; temporary ones, like a broken arm, might mean more difficulty typing or using a mouse.

Here are a few ways content can help

Use unique title tags

Think about how annoying it is when you have multiple tabs open from a website, and they all read the same thing. Multiply that by 100 when you’re using assistive technologies to select the one you want.

Each page title should be unique to the page you’re on, and include:

The main heading of the page or important identifying keywords for the page
The name of the website or company

Split content out under headings

No one likes a page of unbroken text. Headings and subheadings help readers identify chunks of related information and scan through a page. It’s kind of like a high-level outline of what you’re writing about, and is crucial for navigating your content.

This is most effective when the coding uses native HTML formatting tags, so designers and developers should take note.

Write well

It turns out, the things that make for clear writing also make for good accessibility, especially for users who may have a harder time reading or understanding your content:

Keep sentences short by limiting them to one idea each
Avoid acronyms (but if you must use them, define them upfront)
Structure information in a way that makes sense
Aim for a low grade level in readability
Avoid difficult, uncommon, or ambiguous words

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

Find the best format

Text isn’t always the best way to convey a message. Maybe a chart, an image, a table, a bulleted list, or a video would help tell the story in an easier to understand and more memorable way, compared to paragraphs alone.

Make descriptive video transcripts

It’s not enough to upload a transcript. You’ll also want to include descriptive text that tells your audience a little bit about what the speakers look like, where they are, what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it. It’s kind of like a movie script with mini stage directions.

Create a text alternative to infographics

Infographics are incredibly popular for telling stories about data. There’s only one problem: they’re usually heavily designed, and not optimized for screen readers. That’s why it’s a good idea to accompany your infographics with an alternative text-based format that tells the same story, in a different way.

Write meaningful alt text

Alt text describes what an image shows, and it’s what a screen reader reads out loud. As such, it should be as meaningful as possible, telling us something about the objects, action, people, setting, and purpose. Think of how you might describe the image to someone over the phone, says one of many helpful suggestions from accessibility website Wuhcag.

Label links clearly

The days of “click here” are long gone – it’s a pretty well known best practice that links should say something about what to expect when you open them. Accessibility takes it a step further, since some assistive technologies compile a link list that doesn’t benefit from the context of the content around it.

Keep instructions simple

When you need the user to do something, make sure the steps you need them to take are crystal clear. Examples can go a long way. This goes for instructional messaging as well as errors, warnings, and notifications.

Try to avoid instructions that rely on a specific visual identifier (a square button or a red line of text), or an audio cue.

Learning more about accessibility

There are tons of great resources, and I relied on them heavily to write this post. I’ll be paying way more attention to accessibility in my posts into the future, too. I encourage you to do some reading yourself and discover just how much of a difference accessibility makes.