Accessibility Guidelines

CMS Editors are expected to make their content accessible to people who may have visual, auditory, or reading disabilities, or who rely on assistive devices to perceive and understand the content.

Content

• Headings should be formatted using the heading styles (H1/H2/H3/H4)
• Heading levels should only increase by one
• Ensure headings include text
• Use plain English to ensure your content is not too difficult to understand
• Aim for text to have very high contrast (AAA)
• Define lists correctly using the list formatting tools in the HTML editor
• Write lists or groups of links semantically
• Specify a title for all frames
• Avoid using colour alone to provide meaning

Links

• Descriptive links should be self-explanatory even out of context (avoid the use of "click here" etc.)
• Ensure links explain their purpose
• Combine adjacent links with the same destination
• Ensure links explain they open in a new tab
• Avoid using the same link text for different destinations

Alt Text

• Specify alternative text for appropriate images
• Specify alternative text for images inside links
• Avoid alternative text that is the same as adjacent text

Tables

• Add header cells to tables
• Add a scope to table headings
• Remove obsolete scope attribute for table cell

Video & Audio

• All videos require captions
• Automatically generated captions are not accurate enough and should be proofread/corrected before use
• Audio content (podcasts, embedded audio clips) should provide transcripts

PDFs

• Ensure PDFs have a descriptive title set in its document properties
• Tag all PDFs so assistive technologies can interpret and navigate their content
• Ensure PDFs contain selectable, searchable text (not just images of text)
• Ensure PDFs include tagged headings to structure content for accessibility and navigation
• Ensure PDFs specify a default language
• Ensure PDF headings follow a logical order
• Ensure the first heading in the PDF is tagged as H1 (the document’s main title)
• Ensure long PDFs use bookmarks to aid navigation
• Ensure the PDF has a meaningful, descriptive title

PDFs are inaccessible as they are designed for print and not for reading content online. Do not use PDF documents in place of web page content. Acrobat tools make it easy to create accessible PDFs and check the accessibility of existing PDFs.

Note: the majority of people who use a screen reader prefer accessible Word documents.