Writing accessible content

Users interact with text differently online than they do in print, and most people tend to scan website text to find what information is relevant to them.

For this reason, it's important to make text content clear, concise and easy to navigate with headings and shorter chunks of text.

The UL style guide also offers advice on how to make your writing more inclusive.

Text alignment

Left-aligned text

Left-aligned text is best for accessibility because it provides a consistent starting point for each line, allowing for a smoother reading flow.

This alignment reduces visual strain and makes it easier for users with dyslexia, low vision, or cognitive impairments to track lines of text.

Left alignment also minimises uneven spacing between words, improving readability and overall comprehension.

Centre-aligned text

Center-aligned text can be problematic for accessibility because it disrupts the natural flow of reading.

With each line starting in a different position, readers may struggle to locate the beginning of the next line, particularly those with visual or cognitive impairments.

This layout makes reading slower and increases cognitive load, especially for users with dyslexia or low vision.

Left-aligned text is generally recommended for improved readability and accessibility since it maintains a consistent starting point for each line.

Justified text

Justified text aligns text along both left and right margins, which can create uneven spacing between words.

This causes accessibility issues by making it difficult to read, especially for users with cognitive impairments.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommend avoiding justified text to improve readability.

Keep word counts to a minimum

Emphasise text using bold

Avoid BLOCK CAPITALS, italics and underlining when emphasising text. Instead, make them bold.

People with dyslexia can find italicised words harder to read as the letters may have a jagged outline and can seem to run together.

However, some scientific terms need to use italics.

Use images to break up bigger blocks of text

Adhere to guidelines on accessible images and how to create Alternative Text.

Keeping content on a page to a minimum

Accessibility of content for all users is our priority and putting great amounts of content on one page will have a negative effect on accessibility. 

Also, most content is accessed on mobile phones and we would encourage you to break the content up into an easy-access format.

Lists

Lists can make text easier to understand by breaking up dense or complex paragraphs. Lists can also provide a break in the document flow and encourage users to stick with the content.

Use lists to:

• Present key terms and concepts
• Organise information into meaningful chunks
• Convey sequencing necessary for processes and procedures
• Create links to additional information
• Facilitate Scanning

Dos and don'ts

• Do use the list or paragraph formatting

• Don't create lists manually

• Do use an ordered list

• Don't nest lists if not needed

• Don't create lists manually

• Do use the standard bullets

• Don't use custom bullets (they are not recognised by screen readers)

Headings

Structure your document using paragraph styles (for documents) or heading tags (for web pages). Headings make the structure of your documents accessible to screen readers while improving both scannability and maintainability.

You can apply heading best practices in any written medium, from emails to research papers to blog posts. Everywhere you write, document structure can help you organise your work.

As a bonus, if you style your headings correctly and decide to change a font or its weight or size later, you can make one change and all of your headings will change, saving you lots of time.

Impact

Structure is critical for adaptive technology users, who rely on properly formatted headings to understand and navigate documents and web pages. Without this structure, there is no easy way to navigate a document because the document is read as a single long section.

Dos and dont's

Do: Use heading styles

Learn to organize your paragraphs under descriptive headings, and apply "styles" to these headings. This habit will make it easier for anyone to scan through your document and find the parts of the document they want to read, an attribute known as "scannability."

• In most software applications and web content management systems, you can highlight the text you want to make into a heading and apply built-in styles using the styles menu on the formatting toolbar.
• If you are developing a website, you can similarly use CSS to set the style of all headings on the site in one place.

Do: Match heading levels to content structure

On web pages

• Use level 1 headings to indicate the title, topic, or purpose of each page.  
• Repeat all or part of the level 1 heading in the browser page title of webpages. 
• Use level 2 headings to indicate each main section of the document.  
• Use level 3 headings to indicate sub-sections. 
• Use level 4, 5, and 6 headings to indicate sub-sub-sections.

In digital documents

Start with an H1 tag for the main heading of your document. Then tag the remaining headings in a sequential order.

More information on using headings in documents.

Don't : Use heading styles out of order

Don't use heading styles out of order just because you like the way a particular heading level looks, such as using a heading 4 style after a heading 2 style.

Do: Create a Table of Content

A table of contents can make it easier for people to navigate and preview long documents or web pages. 

Use the styles menu for headings, and your software may be able to automatically create a table of contents based on the headings.

Make sure you indicate that the links are anchors, such as by giving them a heading such as:

• Table of Contents
• What's on This Page
• On This Page
• Jump To
• In This Document

Don't: Forget to indicate what anchor links do. 

Don't include anchor links to different sections of a page or a table of contents without indicating what the links will do.