Shift #43 - Accessibility in Writing Webinar
Wednesday, July 10, 2024 | 12-1 pm CST/1-2 pm EST (1 hr)
I have never attended or participated in any webinars about accessibility, so I was really excited to learn about this topic. Immediately our host Rachael asked if she was talking too fast, which is right on point for making the presentation accessible to the audience! I learned a lot of things during this webinar, starting with the fact that disability is on a continuum, unique to individuals, and that it can be temporary (not necessarily permanent) or situational. Ensuring that things are accessible is a design issue, but thankfully there are a lot of assistive technology to help users. Assistive tech includes tools to help people understand and interact with the world, keyboard-only navigation, physical inputs and software that map to keyboard, voice recognition (speech to text), eye tracking, and screen magnifiers. As we write our blog drafts, we need to think about these things. Rachael also talked about readability and plain language, both of which the Library of Congress encourages. Readability means that word shapes matter (font selection matters) so something like word art will be hardest to read for people. It also means cognitive load and difficulty can be affected as we pick fonts. We should use title case and sentence case instead of all or small caps, give generous space between letters, words, lines and paragraphs, make sure font size is adequate, at least 11 point font or 16 pixels (recommended is 12 point font; for PPT, 18 point font is good), and avoid ornate, image-based and decorative fonts. For plain language, it is all about how you communicate, not about WHAT you communicate. Using plain language helps to increase your content's cognitive accessibility, improve translations to other languages, and communicate complex info effectively. Some resources we can use are the Federal Plain Language website, 18F Plain Language Content Guide, Making Content Usable, and PlainLanguage.gov.
Rachael had other tips for us as we wrote our drafts. She pointed out that as we write, we write for our audience (use "you" and "we) and to define who "you" is, particularly when there are multiple "yous". We should choose words carefully (like using common words and define uncommon words), consider who is going to think about the content, choose words that readers will recognize and provide definitions (directly in the text the first time you use the word, as a link to a glossary, or as accessible hover content in web content). For our blog posts, we should be concise and keep the tone conversational (using active voice whenever possible, making it clear who or what is acting), and also to remember to use simple tense. In addition to these tips, Rachael guided us to follow web standards for writing, test our assumptions (especially about our audience) and use literal language and explain implied content (not everyone can get sarcasm, jokes, emotions, etc). She also had other tips when it came to the technology/software that we used for our blogs. Text should be recognizable and read by assistive technology in a way that users can magnify and change the color of the test. We should not use images to replace words. So that our blog can be more readable, we should use headings or lists, because especially as headings can organize our document and improve comprehension, scannability and navigation. Headings also allow users to scan a page to get the overall structure and skip to relevant sections. This was such a useful webinar and I think something graduate students should learn about. I know that in graduate school, we write in academic language but accessibility should always be kept in mind for any type of writing.
Comments
Post a Comment