How to make your headings, fonts, spacing and formatting as accessible as possible.
What is accessible text?
Accessible text is text that can be read by students who have barriers to reading text on a screen. This includes text that can be read by a student:
- Using a screen reader, such as NVDA or JAWS
- With low vision who may want to increase the font size
- With tunnel vision who may want to decrease the font size to have more text in their field of vision
- With dyslexia, the most common Specific Learning Disorder, who may want to change the font or use a read aloud function
- With a cognitive disability, such as ADHD, who may want to use a read aloud function
There are many considerations when creating accessible text. Select one of the following to find out more.
Inbuilt styles
The use of styles is essential for accessible text, regardless of the format it is presented in.
In applications such as Word, styles should be used to set text features such as font, formatting, alignment, and spacing.
In a course site, styles should be used for headings and paragraphs. Other features including spacing are pre-determined and cannot be set using the Styles function.
Within the functionality of the format you are using, always use styles rather than manually changing the formatting of text. An exception to this rule is occasional use of bold with ‘Normal’ text to highlight a particular word or phrase.
Headings
Defined headings are essential for accessible content. The headings levels create a structure for your content. Using headings increases the ease of navigation and readability of your text.
How to apply headings
Headings are applied using in-built styles and are set in levels, i.e. Heading 1, Heading 2 etc. Advice on applying headings:
- Apply headings hierarchically and in sequence, i.e. do not skip heading levels within a section of text.
- Use only one instance of Heading 1 on a page and avoid having too many heading levels – try to keep to three if possible.
- Heading text should be clear and meaningful.
Headings, applied using in-built styles, enable students using screen readers to navigate the content using headings, e.g. move from one Heading 1 to the next Heading 1 without reading the lower-level headings or content. Without the headings, students must read the entire text to find specific sections of the content.
In addition, headings that are appropriately and meaningfully titled help all students understand how the content is structured. This helps them easily identify and navigate to the sections they want to read.
Text that is broken up into logical and digestible sections is easier to read than a single large block of text. This is particularly important for students with the Specific Learning Disorder dyslexia or other cognitive disabilities such as ADHD.
When you create content in a course site or use an ANU template, the heading styles will already be set.
Fonts
Font characteristics that affect accessibility are the typeface, formatting and size.
Sans serif typefaces, often just referred to as fonts, such as Aptos and Arial are considered the most accessible for screens.
Other fonts that are considered reasonably accessible are Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic, Trebuchet, Calibri, Open Sans.
For display on screens, avoid fonts with serifs such as Times New Roman or ‘funky’ fonts such as Gigi.
Bold – individual words and phrases can be bolded to make them stand out but remember that overusing this feature will have the reverse effect.
Italics – words in italics are generally harder to read than non-italicised words, so only italicise words if required, e.g. to comply with referencing style rules.
ALL CAPS – text written completely in capitals is harder to read than text in lower case.
Underlining – underlined words are hard to read and can also be confused with links, so avoid underlining any text that is not a hyperlink.
For documents, ideally font size for normal text should be 12-14 point or equivalent. An acceptable alternative, however, is providing the content in a format that allows students to modify font size to suit themselves, either through the font size setting or zooming.
In the LMS, the size for the normal text style will be set and students can increase that through zooming their screen.
For presentations, your font size should be at least 18 point.
Alignment and spacing
Other text positioning characteristics that affect accessibility are alignment, spacing and text boxes.
Paragraph text should be left-aligned.
Avoid right-aligned and centre-aligned text.
Do not use justified text. Justified text is much harder to read than left-aligned text due to the word spacing that is applied across the width of the page.
You should adequately space your text for ease of reading.
In your course site, the vertical spacing is pre-defined.
In Word, you can use the line spacing setting under paragraph formatting and apply any changes to the relevant style, e.g. Normal, Heading 2. Do not create extra lines to space out text by pressing <enter>. Screen readers read out every <enter> which is very tedious and time consuming.
Hint: turn on show/hide paragraph markers (with the button ¶) to easily see how vertical spacing has been set up.
Very wide blocks of text can be hard to read for some users.
In your course site, the horizontal spacing is pre-defined.
In Word, avoid widening the text by making the side margins smaller or using landscape orientation unless necessary, i.e. a table with many columns.
Text boxes
Text boxes are commonly used in Word to highlight and delineate important text. Unfortunately, text boxes are not accessible to students who are using screen readers which means that any text in the text box is ignored by the screen reader. This defeats the purpose of having the text in a text box.
Fortunately, there is an alternative that achieves the same goal and is accessible for your students – using the borders and shading functionality in Word. By applying borders to your text and then applying shading to the area inside the borders, you can draw attention to your text and still have it readable by a screen reader.
Case
Best practice is to use sentence case for headings and CamelCase for hashtags.
When using sentence case for headings, you only capitalise the first letter of the first word of your heading, plus any proper nouns, e.g. Australia, or acronyms and initialisms, e.g. NATO or ANU.
Sentence case is not a text feature that can be defined using styles. This means you need to be aware of this particular best practice and remember to apply it yourself.
Don’t use ALL CAPS for headings. Text written completely in capitals is harder to read than text in lower case.
When using camel case for hashtags, you capitalise the first letter of each word in multiple word hashtags. CamelCase allows screen reader technology to distinguish words in a hashtag, increases legibility, and makes the hashtag overall easier to read for everyone.
E.g. Inaccessible hashtag: #accessiblelearningmaterials
E.g. Accessible hashtag: #AccessibleLearningMaterials
Text density
Large blocks of text are hard for many students to read but are particularly difficult for students with cognitive and/or learning disabilities. Two strategies that you can use regardless of the format of your content are chunked and concise text.
Break up your text into logical and manageable chunks, each of which focus on one idea or concept.
On a single page of content, you can use headings and sub headings to help with this.
In your LMS course site, you can also use multiple pages instead of one long page of text. You can also use images to break up text, but be careful not to overuse this technique as it can result in the same effect for students as large blocks of text.
Review your text and make it as concise as you can without losing essential content. It can be very helpful to have a peer review your text. You can also use Microsoft Copilot to provide suggestions on how to make text more concise.
Technical or discipline specific terminology
It is important to provide a glossary or explanation for technical terms, jargon and discipline specific terminology. The glossary needs to be easy for students to find and refer back to as they are engaging with your learning materials.
It is best practice to provide dates in the format DD Month YY or DD Mon YY rather than in all numbers. This reduces any possible confusion with Australian versus US formatted dates for international students or for students using a screen reader that may not have the correct language selected.
