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Accessibility guide

Follow the rules laid out in the style guide

  • the style manual has accessibility baked into it
  • by following its advice and rules, you make your content more accessible
  • you should also follow the other rules laid out in the remainder of this section

Page title

  • the title is the first thing a screen reader reads, so it should describe the topic or purpose of the page
  • it should be brief, clear and informative
  • follow the standard format for titles [use Sutton’s title style]

Structure your content using headings

  • people who use screen readers will often navigate a website by having the screen reader read out the headings
  • structure your content into bite-sized chunks and give those chunks a heading
  • use the correct heading styles (H1, H2, H3, and so on) in descending order and do not skip any levels

Make link text meaningful

  • people who use screen readers will often navigate a website by tabbing from link to link, without reading the surrounding text
  • this means that the screen reader reads a list of links to them
  • this is only useful if the individual links are meaningful, even when read without the surrounding text
  • the style manual has examples of meaningful link text

Use tables sparingly

  • do not use tables to lay out text
  • use tables for data that is too detailed or complicated to be described adequately in text, and which lends itself to being presented in rows and columns
  • make sure the table has a header row or screen readers will ignore it

Provide alt text for images

  • ensure all images have alt text describing the image
  • this text will be read out by screen readers to people who are unable to view the image
  • consult the CMS manual to find out how to add alt text to an image

Avoid using text in images as the sole method of conveying information

  • screen readers can’t access any text that is part of an image
  • the text can also not be found by search engines
  • if you need to use an image with text in it, repeat that text in the document or the image’s alt text

Publish everything as webpages or as accessible PDFs

  • we try to publish all our content on webpages
  • you can publish the content as an accessible PDF when it would be impractical to publish it as a webpage
  • we do not use or link to any other document formats

Make sure all PDFs are accessible