Making Your Web Content Accessible - Part 2

How your content affects people with dyslexic and learning disabilities

Users with learning disabilities are an often overlooked group when creating accessible websites. For these users, it’s important to make things clear and consistent, and to support content with visual clues where possible, to reduce the amount of reading required. Here are some areas to focus on when creating content for your not-for-profit website:

1 Hierarchy of headings

Headings on a website run from h1 (the most important) to h6 (the least important). Make sure you use only one h1 on a page, to clearly state what the page is about. Then move down sequentially through each heading, e.g. after the h1 at the start of the page, the next most important headings should be h2. Make sure that the use of a lower-ranking heading is for a sub section, and an equal or higher ranking shows the start of a new section.

The heading should clearly express what topic each section covers, and a new heading should be used if the topic changes. The one exception is for content used across multiple pages, for example in the footer or the navigation. Here the most important thing is to be consistent across your whole website.

2 Introduction at the start

In addition to making sure you use headings appropriately, there are other ways to arrange your text to make it easier for visitors to skim through. It’s important to note that most visitors to your site, regardless of learning disabilities, will often be skimming through your content to find the specific things they need – they don’t sit down and read one page after another in order.

It's best for each page to have an introduction, which is as short and concise as possible, while making it clear what topic the page covers. If your page covers multiple topics, it may be best to consider breaking it into multiple pages. The exception here is if you have a title that clearly sums up the page. For example if the page is called “the history of our organisation” then a summary may not be necessary. Don’t add text just for the sake of it.

3 Next steps

At the end of a page, it is often a good idea to suggest next steps a user can take, for example links to other pages that contain relevant information, or a call to action suggesting they contact you or use one of your services. It’s usually better not to reach the end of a page and leave a user unsure what to do next. Additionally, throughout the text, whenever you mention another page or service, make sure it links to those parts of your site.

4 Bold text

Skimming text can also be made much easier by making sure you use bold text for the key point in a sentence. That way, if users struggle with reading, or if they are just in a hurry, it can be much easier for them to pick out the gist of a section without having to read each word. Other styles such as using italics for names can also make skimming easier, as can making sure the text used for links will make sense on its own (e.g. avoid a link that just says click here).

5 Keep it succinct

Arguably the most important thing you can do to make sure your content is easy to read for users with learning difficulties is to keep it as succinct as you can. While you don’t want to miss out any important information, make sure you think about each thing you add and ask yourself, is it really helpful, and is there a more concise way to say it? Often it takes more work to keep things short than it does to do a longer version, but the extra work is worth it to make your website as easy to use as possible.

When writing content for your charity’s website, it’s common to fall into the trap of deciding to have a page on a topic, and then feeling the need to write content to fill it, but this can lead to filling up your site with things your users don’t really need, and drowning out the important information. For each page or section you come to, always stop and think what you are trying to say and why, and make sure you really understand the purpose of what you are saying.

6 Reading age of content

Make all the text you write as clear and simple as possible. You can use tools such as www.webfx.com/tools/read-able/ to check the reading age of your content. For AAA accessibility, the higher WCAG standard, it recommends keeping all text to the reading age of a 9 year old or below, and to add supplementary information where content has to be more complicated.