Accessible digital content

Illustration by Fruzka from Ouch!

Making your content work for everyone

It's important to make sure that the digital content you create is a good user experience for as many people as possible. The internet, and the massive amount of information within in, should be available to everyone equally.

Making your content accessible involves taking into account the way that it is written, displayed and structured so that it meets accessibility standards. This helps to make the content work well for everyone, not just those using accessible devices to access information.

Some ways HTML affects content accessibility

Headings and text

It's not just the way you write the words on a page that affects it's level of accessibility. It is also the way headings and text are styled with HTML and CSS.

Having the ability to change the HTML and CSS gives you extra control over all text styling. It gives you the ability to choose styling settings for headings and text that are more accessible.

Choosing a sans serif font which is easier for people with visual and learning disabilities to read.
Choosing a font colour that has enough colour contrast with the background to be read easily.
Adding white space around text to make it easier to read and not too overwhelming.
Avoiding using bolded or italicised text unless needed for more than aesthetic reasons, as these stylings draw the eye and interrupt a users normal reading patterns, and are also not always recognised by accessible technology.

Images

Having access to the HTML also allows you to make sure that any images within your content are marked appropriately.

Take the image on this page for example. This moving image grabs the eye visually and matches the page's colour palette. However, it doesn't contribute any information to the page that might help the user.

In a case like this the alternate text in the image HTML can be left empty. Doing so means an accessible device would skip over this as if the image was not there, and ensures that someone with a visual disability won't get a nice but essentially pointless image description read out to them.

However, if the image did contain valuable information that may be helpful to the user, you should include alternate image text. Good alternate text includes all important pieces of information from the image, so a user who reads this text gets the same information as a user who sees the image.

Find out more

Making digital content accessible is not something you learn overnight, and there is much more that can be done to make a good experience for everyone than what has been mentioned on this page.

If you want to learn more, a good starting place is the World Wide Web Consortium website.

highlight new and improved ways of making digital content accessible
include the different sides of debates happening in the digital accessibility community
provide you with a platform to voice the accessibility issues you are trying to solve, and allow others in our network to share their knowledge.