Category Archives: Accessibility

Trends in Technical Communication: Web Content Accessibility (Part II)

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Through the mobile web, overlapping best practices for web content accessibility are about to go prime time. (See Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices).

To prepare, I’ve been reacquainting myself with my treasured copy of Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, by Janice (Ginny) Redish. There, you’ll find in my opinion, what’s probably one of, if not the best books available, on writing online.

Tips for Writing Accessible Web Content

Throughout her book, Redish sprinkles generous tips on web content accessibility. Here are just a few:

Let people choose their own text size (p. 148). Provide buttons on the web page to remind site visitors that they can adjust the size.

Make illustrations accessible, with meaningful alt text (p. 305). To develop helpful alt text, Redish suggests following the World Wide Web Consortium’s advice, imagining that you are reading the web page aloud, over the telephone. Ask yourself: “What would you say about the image to make your listener understand it? (From www.w3.org).

Mark headings with the proper HTML tags (p. 237). Those using screen-readers want to scan web pages, just as sighted visitors do, Redish explains. If the headings are properly tagged, your blind web users can “scan with their ears,” (p. 320), by jumping from heading to heading.

Start headings with a key word (p. 247). Those who are listening to screen-readers scan only the first few words, in each heading. Make sure to include your keywords, at the beginning.

Write meaningful links (p. 318.) Click here and More links are useless to web visitors who are listening via screen-readers. Instead, Redish suggests rewriting these links to specify what visitors will get “more” of” and to use more informative words, as the link.

Tips for Formatting Accessible Web Content

Meanwhile, the January issue of Intercom–the Magazine of the Society for Technical Communication–provides detailed tips on making your web content’s formatting more accessible.

Properly tagging web content helps blind visitors using screen-readers and other forms of assistive technology to skim your site. It also helps make your document more accessible because anyone who cannot read your document can reformat it, by importing a new template, or editing the styles in your document, until each has a format they find readable (pp. 13-14).

According to STC’s Cliff Tyllick (@clifftyll) on Twitter, here are ways to take control of your text:

  • Use heading styles.
  • Use styles—or at least automated formats—to create lists.
  • Use styles to control paragraph formatting.
  • Use styles to control special character formatting.
  • Insert tables—do not draw them.
  • Use tables to display data, never simply to position content.
  • When you use informative illustrations, position them in line with text.
  • Associate alternative text with each informative illustration.

Additional Resources

For more information on writing for the web, check out Ginny Redish’s excellent slide presentation (PDF link follows): Letting Go of the Words- Content as Conversation.

For a clearinghouse of information on web content accessibility, I also highly recommend STC’s AccessAbility SIG (@stcaccess on Twitter), by STC SIG manager Karen Mardahl (@kmdk on Twitter). In Jan.’s Intercom issue about accessibility, Karen wrote a great article on “Captioning Videos on YouTube.”

If you know of other resources, please feel free to add them to the growing list of Web Content Accessibility resources, which appeared in my last post. Thanks to folks for suggestions so far, including these resources: WebAIM: Web Accessibility in Mind, WebAxe: Podcast and Blog on Practical Web Design Accessibility Tips, and the IBM Developer Accessibility Guidelines.

I’ll make sure to add these and any other suggested resources to the final list.

Please also feel free to add your best accessibility tips, in the comments. I’m still very much learning and am grateful for your help and recommendations.

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Contacting the Author: Content for a Convergent World – Peg Mulligan’s Blog

5 Resources on Web Content Accessibility

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While coming up to speed on recent trends on web content accessibility, I came across a number of great resources, which I’d like to share. These resources are especially helpful for developing accessible web content for those with disabilities.

Many of the same principles apply to the overall usability of your site and are considered best practices for any site visitor, including mobile users.

1. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides guidelines/standards on making accessible Web content, as well as related best practices for making content mobile-friendly.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a guide for making Web sites accessible to people with disabilities.

The Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) is a guide for making Web sites usable from a mobile device.

Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices describes the considerable overlap between the WCAG and MWBP standards, providing additional links about the similarities.

Techniques for WCAG 2.0  describes specific authoring practices, which can help you implement WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

21 new PDF Techniques for WCAG 2.0 provides tips for Producing Accessible PDF Files, with examples from Adobe Acrobat Pro, Adobe Reader 9, Microsoft Word 2007, and other applicable tools. (These tips are from Techniques for WCAG 2.0.)

2. STC AccessAbility SIG

An Accessibility and Technical Communication Blog The AccessAbility SIG is a Special Interest Group, supported by the Society for Technical Communication, which serves as a clearinghouse to match people with products, services, and/or relevant literature, relating to a variety of accessibility needs. The blog for the AccessAbility provides additional links to other Accessibility Blogs.

Accessibility and Usability Topics at #STC11 provides a great list of current topics of interest, relating to accessibility and usability, as to be presented at the STC Summit 2011. (Stay tuned for information about the recorded presentations, available at SUMMIT@aClick.)

3. Boston Internet-Accessibility

The Boston-IA site provides education on the accessibility of electronic information, including these resources:

 4.      Vendors

Microsoft’s Accessibility Overview lists resources on the latest developments in accessibility, and includes a link to Microsoft’s Web Accessibility Handbook.

Adobe Accessibility provides information and news about accessibility in Adobe products, for people with disabilities.

5.      Blog Accessibility

At Blog Accessibility, Glenda Watson Hyatt blogs about how to create a more accessible blogosphere. She also provides a free e-book, with related tips.

So, that’s my round-up of links, on web content accessibility. Do you have any other good resources to share?

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Contacting the Author: Content for a Convergent World – Peg Mulligan’s Blog

Trends in Technical Communication: Web Content Accessibility (Part I)

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In January, Intercom–the magazine for the Society for Technical Communication—provided an excellent issue on all things web content accessibility, including articles on “Accessibility 101 for Technical Writers,” “Captioning Videos on YouTube,”and an “Alternative to Universal Design in Mainstream Video Games.”

Minor Accommodations, Major Impact

The article made me recall a few contracts back, when I was working as a technical writer, in a government setting. For the first time in my fifteen-year career, due to government mandates, an accessibility check was a required part of the documentation’s production process.

At the time, I remember being surprised at how relatively painless most of the accessibility guidelines were to implement—simple changes at the markup level, including alt tags, page titles, headings, and lists, which were only time-consuming if they had to be revised globally, as opposed to correctly implementing them the first time.

For print documents, I implemented these additional accessibility guidelines: providing alt text for embedded images, making sure to include an alternative format (.txt, .doc, or .xsl) for PDFs, keeping file sizes down to less than 5 megabytes, and adding electronic titles to Microsoft Office documents.

Whether for print or online documentation, I learned the cardinal rule of accessibility: Content needs structure.

Optimizing our Process

Some of the accessibility principles were not so straightforward, especially structuring content. However, information design is part of many technical writers’ standard practice. Others were not difficult to incorporate into my writing routine, once they had been pointed out to me.

Given how much of an impact these relatively minor accommodations can make for a more accessible Web–and how a simple style sheet could remind writers to more seamlessly incorporate many accessibility best practices across their content–it seems almost impossible to me, that this government contract was one of the few times I have formally encountered best practices for web content accessibility.

Convergence: Web Content Accessibility and the Mobile Web

With the rise of the mobile web, we may finally see more mainstream settings start addressing accessibility. As it turns out, what’s good for designing for people with disabilities is also good for designing mobile content. (For more on these best practices and for resources on web content accessibility, stay on the lookout next week, for Part II of this post.)

Questions and a Call to Action

In the meantime, for technical writers especially, how much has web content accessibility been a part of your job? How does accessibility apply to user assistance and structured authoring?

And I’d like to conclude here, with a call to action mainly to myself, to do a better job incorporating alt tags for the images, in my blog posts, especially the retroactive ones, where I wasn’t following the practice. In the end, accessibility is about taking the time to do the little things–many times also the right things (both for our disabled users, and in the case of mobile content, our bottom lines)–consistently.

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Contacting the Author: Content for a Convergent World – Peg Mulligan’s Blog