Creating accessible content

Page title

• the title is the first thing a screen reader reads, so it should describe the topic or purpose of the page
• the page title should be short, active, and meaningful 
• if your page is transactional (has a call to action), include a verb in the title like ‘Pay for..’
• check page titles start with a capital letter and all following words are in lowercase unless they are a proper noun

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

Page length

• there is no ideal minimum or maximum page length
• make the main body of your page as focused as possible
• get to the point quickly to help your reader find the information they need

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

Read more about writing descriptive links

Use tables sparingly

• do not use tables to layout 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
• follow the guidelines for providing alt text for images

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
• find out more information about providing alt text for images

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

• gov.uk provides information on how to publish accessible PDFs
• WebAIM provides information on how to create PDFs from Word docs
• Adobe provides information on how to scan documents and convert them into accessible PDFs