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Welcome to part two of LSNTAP's Web Accessibility series! Let's talk about text.
The main thing to keep in mind when writing content for your site is that visitors will
want to skim through it quickly. Help them out by breaking your text down into short
paragraphs or "chunks," and include summaries or taglines before long articles.
Keep the reading level to an eighth-grade level or below, and minimize the use of jargon,
idioms, acronyms and abbreviations. Clearly define any that are necessary to use. Basically,
use that plain text thing that all the kids are talking about.
In terms of formatting, make sure that you don't use a font size smaller than the default,
and including an option to make text even bigger is great -- though most browsers will
already allow users to do so. Also, justifying your text to both the left and right margins
can make the spacing pretty weird -- so just choose one!
Avoid using all caps, because screen readers -- services used by people who are blind or
have low vision to read web pages aloud -- may interpret words in all caps as acronyms. Plus,
they make the reader feel like they are being shouted at. So just don't.
Finally, if you can, provide translations of your content. At the very least, using
plain text should make it easier for third-party web translation services to translate your
content. Well, that's about all we have on text. Keep
watching for some tips on multimedia content. Later!