As a marketer, you plan out both strategic and tactical campaigns. You map out customer journeys and thoughtfully create content to nurture your contacts from one point to the next. Then you get stuck into creating digital assets, with a vision of success ahead. The key to unlocking success? Making content accessible. After all, to convert your audiences, they must be able to engage with your communications.
With this in mind, it’s important to make sure your online messages reach and resonate with every reader. That means considering the experiences of people with disabilities.
People with physical, cognitive, literacy or language challenges access and understand information in different ways. Accessible design must be considered. Not only that, accessible language matters too.
But making content accessible doesn’t just fall to the marketing department alone. Every team creates content used to communicate with your audiences, especially beyond the marketing funnel. Making sure all teams keep the user experiences of a diverse audience in mind is important. Not only for your brand image, it’s also the right thing to do. It can be helpful to have an accessibility style guide.
For content to serve its purpose it must be able to be accessed, and used. But what does this really mean? Have a listen as Clare explains it all in this short podcast. Gain top tips as Clare shares her advice as one of Content Design London’s Content Designer’s.
Making content accessible is about more than just following accessibility requirements, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). It’s about making sure our readers feel truly included when interacting with us online. For example, including alternative text on our online images isn’t enough. We must carefully choose this text to provide screen reader users with the same visual experience as sighted readers.
Beyond visual elements and functional accessibility, is our choice of language. We want our readers to not only access our content, but understand it too. Not everyone has the same level of understanding. Using plain language and easy-read techniques are also important.
Below, we’ve created a guide to help you. It’s been created with accessibility best practice and web writing standards in mind. By following this guide, you’ll be improving the customer experience for everyone, including people with disabilities.
Discover advice to using and creating accessible:
Accessible language is about writing in a way that’s easy to understand. This means keeping content simple, short and clear.
To achieve this:
The above are all factors that affect readability. That means how easy or difficult it is to read something.
Accessible writing helps people with low literacy and cognitive disabilities to understand your content better. It also helps the average reader. For example, when it comes to sentence length, the longer it is, the harder it is to understand - for everyone. According to the American Press Institute, at 8 words long, readers can understand 100% of the content. At 14 words, they understand 90%. But at 43 words long, understanding drops to below 10%.
Short, simple and clear is better for everyone. It’s also in line with web writing standards. It makes content easier to scan for online readers. And that’s beneficial in today’s fast-paced world.
Fill in the form to access this recorded webinar and gain an overview of Plain English best practice.
Explore how to write reports, guides, emails & more that are easy for all your audience to understand. Take part in interactive tasks and practice your new skills.
Find out more about this Plain English webinar.
Making content accessible is also about optimising visual elements for accessibility. The typeface you choose, as well as the size and layout of your text, can impact how easy content is to read. Not only that, how text is laid out on the page also has an impact.
When writing for the web, headings, subheadings and links are an important part of the journey.
Online readers tend to scan content until they find a section that’s relevant to them. Some may also use a screen reader to access content. For example, a blind user. Headings and subheadings help all users, including screen reader users, to scan a web page. For assistive technology to flow through content in the way you intend, accessibility requirements should be followed.
A web page is made up of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). You may also have heard of the term ‘semantic markup’. This is a way of writing and structuring your HTML so that it reinforces the meaning of content. Your content must be marked up correctly, so that the hierarchy of your content can be understood. This applies to all text on a web page, including headings, paragraphs, emphasised text, lists
You should:
As you plan out a customer journey, you’ll be directing readers through your funnel content. You’ll interlink between web pages, and have different conversion points along the way. In the same way that content should be marked up properly, hyperlinks should be too. There’s also good practice when it comes to writing link text.
To improve the accessibility of hyperlinks:
All the tips we’ve given you above offer a better user experience for all your audience. It also makes it easier for search engines to understand what your web pages are about. And that’s beneficial for SEO. Improving accessibility can help improve your organic reach too.
A quick, practical guide to creating accessible content for websites.
Download for free and share with your teams. Help them to understand how to make information accessible.
When it comes to accessibility, it’s important to remember visual accessibility. But, what is visual accessibility?
Visual accessibility is about making sure all users enjoy the same benefits from your beautiful designs. This includes someone that is colour-blind, or has visual impairments. Visual elements should be given alternative text so these users can enjoy them too. This is text that’s read out to screen reader users when they come across an image. Visual elements also help to improve understanding, so alternative text should also convey meaning.
Some tips to improve visual accessibility are:
To create accessible videos, think about universal design. That means creating videos with a wide range of people in mind. People with different abilities and disabilities, with different preferences, and in different situations. With this in mind, both visual elements and audio in videos should be accessible.
When it comes to visual accessibility, it’s important to think about viewers who have photosensitive epilepsy or are colour blind. As well as those with cognitive disabilities and visual impairments. Each interact with video content differently.
Providing captions and a transcript can help people with hearing impairments to understand video content. It’s also a benefit for those who prefer to read rather than listen. And those with no means to listen to content.
Captions provide a text version of spoken words in video content. They’re intended for people with hearing impairments. They can be closed (with the option to toggle on) or open (always visible). Captions should cover all dialogue, music and sound effects in a video. They should appear on screen in time with audio and video content.
Transcripts provide a text representation for video and audio-only content. They’re useful for people with hearing and visual impairments. As well as those with cognitive disabilities. They’re usually made available on a web page beside the audio or video content.
From pdfs and graphics, to videos and social media, it's important that we open up every piece of digital content.
In this webinar, hear from the experts at AbilityNet, Content Design London and Texthelp. Gain practical advice to help you create content that’s available and accessible to everyone.
PDF documents have many benefits. They can be interactive, convenient, secure and compact. But, they aren’t always accessible to people with disabilities. Making content accessible in a PDF means taking time to set the document up with accessibility in mind.
Some actions include:
At Texthelp, we use Adobe Indesign to create accessible PDFs. Using the latest versions of Adobe Indesign, it’s easier to carry out the actions we’ve mentioned. You can also:
We also use Adobe Acrobat. It allows you to do a broad accessibility check that will flag accessibility errors. You can also check the reading order and edit any tags that need updated.
If you’re an Adobe user, check out this Facebook Group on PDF accessibility.
If you don’t have Indesign, you can always use Microsoft Word. Their Accessibility Checker can help you find accessibility problems before you convert your document from MS Word into a PDF.
With social media being a large part of our digital campaigns, a lot of the time that’s where a customer’s journey with us begins. Accessible social media plays a part in creating a good user experience for everyone. It also helps to create a positive brand image at the first impression.
Here’s 7 top tips to accessible social media content:
If you prefer to use a social media management tool, make sure it has accessibility features included. Not all allow you to add alternative text to images, for example. We recommend using Sprout Social or Hootsuite.
For more support, check out this Facebook group dedicated to Accessible Social.
So far, we’ve talked about making content accessible in advance of it being used. But what about live content? How can you make your webinars and meetings more accessible?
3 tips to creating accessible webinars:
In this session, hear from Clare, our inclusive speaker featured in the snippet above. As Content Designer at Content Design London, Clare shares expert advice on creating inclusive content. Explore how readability, use of language, and inclusive design comes into play. Gain an overview of readability guidelines, and discover best practice around inclusive language and design.
Making content accessible on a podcast means taking into account many of the elements we’ve already covered. This includes using an accessible media player to host the episode. As well as providing a transcript.
At Texthelp, we use the transcription service on Rev.com.
With this service, a human transcribes the audio. This is better than relying on an audio transcription, which can often be inaccurate. There’s also the option to add timing to the transcript. This is a nice addition as it gives people the option to navigate to parts of your podcast as they read the script. It can help with understanding.
We also host our Texthelp Talks podcast on Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout allows us to add a transcript when we’re uploading a new episode. We also embed the episode onto our website, and include a full transcript on the web page.
Here’s an example: Podcast: 6 myths designers and marketers believe about web accessibility.
Colour blindness affects around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women in the world. Most people with colour blindness are unable to fully see red, green or blue light. The most common form of colour blindness is red/green colour blindness. The way this affects people means they can mix up any colour that has red or green it in. For example, people with this colour blindness could mix up blue and purple.
That’s why colour should never be used alone to convey meaning.
Your online visitors should be able to understand information if all the colours were removed. Not only that, choosing an accessible colour palette is important when designing any digital asset. The colours used should offer good colour contrast between background and foreground. WCAG* accessibility requirements call for a colour contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for text under 18pts. Or, 3:1 for text larger than 18pts. (*WCAG Level AA criteria).
Using a colour contrast checker such as WebAim’s contrast checker can help.
We hope the information we’ve given you so far has helped shine a line on making content accessible. As you begin to take action in creating more accessible customer journey’s, it can be useful to create an accessibility style guide.
That way, you can bring your whole organisation with you. Feel free to use the above content to help you create your own accessibility style guide.
We’ve also included some extra tips and tricks below:
At Texthelp, we created a roadmap to improve digital accessibility and inclusion. Feel free to take inspiration from our commitments and promises.
We’ve created checklists to help you kick start your efforts, and get the conversation going. They’ve been created with the accessibility requirements of WCAG in mind.
Now you know how to make information accessible, it’s time to consider what else can impact an accessible user experience
Continue learning. Explore more areas of digital accessibility.