Accessibility rules for web content writers

One of the challenges of maintaining accessible websites is that content writers need to aware accessibility rules.

Accessible content cannot be automated. This applies even when entering content via a Content Management System.

Style rules can, and should be, written into the style guide. Even so, a basic awareness of some relevant aspects of HTML will benefit web content writers.

Hopefuly writers should also gain an appreciation of how blind and other disabled users interact with web content using assistive technologies.

Some disabled users, for example dyslexic users, will be using convential web browsers. These users to will benefit from the accessibility rules being applied. In fact all users benefit from accessible content, as these best practise principles help to create uable content for all users.

The semantic web

The semantic – literally 'meaningful' &ndash web is the vision of the World Wide Web promoted by Tim Berners-Lee. Sometimes the semantic web is referred to as Web 3.0. Web 3.0 could mean all sorts of futuristic happenings, like your fridge publishing data.

More prosiacally it means HTML mark-up being meaningful (along with much more fanciful things like the aforementioned fridge). XHTML and HTML5, unlike earlier versions of HTML (well HTML4), seperate semantic information from presentational information.

The implications for web content writers are not massive, but they help explain the principles of accessible web content. A couple of good examples are how bold and italic text are marked-up.

Depreciated tags for italic <i> and bold <b> exist, but you should never use them.

Links

The accessibility rules for formatting hyperlinked text are:

  • Never link on a URL.
  • Always link on a descriptive phrase.
  • Do not repeat the same phrase on the same page to link to different files.
  • There must be at least one character between links.

Hyperlinking email addresses

Headings

Documents should be formatted with a meaningful and coherent structure. Structuring improves the accessibility, the cross-platform portability and searchability of documents.

Essentially this means marking-up titles, headings and sub-headings as such.

Headings and sub-headings should always be marked up in a heading tag applied in hierarchal order in which H1 denotes the heading of most importance. Hierarchies of heading tags can be nested.

Special HTML Characters

Metadata

It is also essential to omit certain characters from Metadata fields. The biggest culprits are:

  • Ampersands (&) should always be rendered 'and'. The word 'and' may seem briefer than '&', but in HTML it is not. As a special character it will be either converted to '&' or cause accessibility issues.
  • Omit hyphens (-) from metadata. Hyphened expressions require Boolean searching to be picked up by some search engines.

More on web content

See also

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