Accessible Digital Content

Accessing digital content for people who have low vision, are visually impaired, people who are blind, are colorblind, or have differences in their mobility can mean the use of assistive technology like screen readers, or can mean relying only on the keyboard to navigate, it can also mean differences in color perception.

This is important to think about at the beginning of a project, just like conceptualizing, structuring, and preserving your data that have already been covered. So whether your data goes public or not, understanding formatting content and visual design will inform your process.

Below are methods for designing accessible content:

Text Content

• Write headings that clearly summarize content and have good structure. Often users with screen readers will scan web content first, reading each heading. Formatting markers in documents like “Heading 1” matter as they will inform what is read, and in what order.

• Clearly punctuate with commas, end punctuation, semicolons, lists, and paragraph breaks.

• Be mindful of using homographs, words that look the same but are pronounced differently depending on context. Screen readers may read these words differently than their intended use.

• Make sure to spell out acronyms at least once. Screen reader technology will recognize words in all caps and read each individual letter most of the time, but it largely depends on the screen reader’s programming to determine how acronyms will be read.

• Make sure links are descriptive of what is being linked to or asked of the user. For example, this is a printable checklist for creating digital content. That’s a good link. An example of a bad link is this one for the ADA research brief. It is subtle, but describe what the content is or how it should be used as much as possible.

Accessible Tables

• Define columns and rows with readable text.

• Add a readable summary of the table’s content and purpose.

• Do not use tables for decorative formatting, as this would be confusing for users with screen readers.

Images, Sounds, and Multimedia Accessibility

• Provide alt text for images when you embed them into a digital document or web page.

• If there is visible text associated with an image, do not rely on body text or page formatting to link the text to an image. So instead of writing, “the image on the left,” use text that is above, below, or next to the image.

• Transcription for audio should be present, including transcription of background noise, unspoken action, music, and other auditory cues like humming, panting, screaming.

Color Accessibility

• Avoid relying on color only for communicating information. For example hyperlinks should be formatted with an underline or box, not just a change in text color.

• Avoid using green and red to distinguish content, as this is the most common type of colorblindness.

Special note on PDFs

• PDFs overall give a poor experience.

• Users with screen readers will hear fragments of information, content will be read out of order, and topic headings are more difficult to identitfy unless annotated with structure tags.

• If field labels on PDF forms have not been manually configured, they can be impossible to fill out.

• PDFs do not adapt to mobile devices, making reading them difficult.

• Alternatives to PDFs are making the content a website or an editable document. If a PDF must be used, format with structural annotations, and consider providing an alternative in addition.