the many facets of accessibility in technical communication
DESCRIPTION
Whether you're using relative font sizes for those with low vision, or keyboard functionality for those with motor issues, creating more accessible tech comm content for people with disabilities also makes it easier to navigate and follow for people without disabilities.TRANSCRIPT
The Many Facets of Accessibility in
Technical Communication
Char James-Tanny
@charjtf / @helpstuff
I Parent by Text Message
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I parent by text message. Teenagers hate talking on the phone. Teenagers like to text. This is their preferred method of communication, even with their friends. My son sends and receives approximately 1500 text messages a month. (Yes, we have an unlimited plan.) Face-to-face is uncomfortable. I travel, sometimes a lot, and sometimes I travel to different time zones. I love him dearly, but I really don’t want to talk to him at 4 am before he goes to school. In order, teens text, tweet, [Instagram | Vine | Facebook], call. The only time this order changes is for emergencies. It all comes down to knowing your audience.
Knowing the Audience
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“Know your audience” is one of the tenets of technical communication.
Keep Out
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When we design, develop, and deliver content that isn’t available to everyone, it’s like attaching on a big “Keep Out” sign. We originally saw this during the browser wars of the late 90s, when sites were tested in Internet Exploror but nothing else. We saw it during the 2000s when sites were tested on large monitors at high resolution. We see it today when restaurants (one of the worst offenders) use Flash for their website. We also see it today when sites can’t be accessed by screen readers, when videos don’t have captions, when images don’t have alt attributes. We see it when writers use the biggest word they can instead of the best word. We see it today when situational disabilities (typically, panic, stress, or lack of sleep) have us going to the wrong place.
Open 24 Hours
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What we want to do is design, develop, and deliver information that is always available to our audience. Of course, it’s more difficult today to determine just who our audience is; we no longer have a tight focus on who because our content is almost always available at any time to anyone. (For example, anyone can read a blog post, whether or not we originally thought they were part of our audience.)
Some Types of Disabilities
Sensory Physical Cognitive Intellectual Situational
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WCAG 2.0 and POUR
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The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/) includes four principles that provide the foundation for Web accessiblity: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (“POUR”). While these guidelines were written for Web content, they also pertain to printed documentation. Everyone benefits when your content meets POUR’s objectives, whether they have a disability, or they don’t speak English well, or they need to translate your content. Perceivable: People must be able to recognize the information. Operable: People must be able to use the interface (with a mouse, screen reader, sip-and-puff, keyboard, etc.). Understandable: People must be able to understand the information. Robust: People must be able to access the information.
Easy Tasks - Structure
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Much of what we do already addresses some best practices.
Headings
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If you use structured authoring, you’re already using headings correctly. Do not manually format text so that it looks like a heading. Just about everyone skims a page to check out the headings. But headings are especially important for people with cognitive issues. And screen reader users can pull up a dialog box of just the headings that they can skim. It’s better to make headings more specific (you want them to be self-explanatory). Use “subject-verb-object” to create the strongest headings. (And be sure to use heading tags in sequential order, with at least two headings per level.)
Short Sentences and Paragraphs
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You want to keep sentences shorter than 25 words, but you also want to vary the sentence length. (Otherwise, sentences sound very stilted.) By creating shorter chunks, it’s easier for everyone to read and understand. Keep paragraphs to one-to-three sentences. On a printed page, this is a relatively short paragraph, but on a mobile phone, it appears to be longer because of the screen size. (And no one likes to read text-heavy content. Read a legal agreement if you’re wondering why.) And remove extra words (like “please”) whenever possible.
Second Person, Active Voice, Present Tense
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Back in the “old days”, documents used passive voice and third person. This removes the user from the action, and makes it harder for users to understand the concepts and instructions. Use active voice and present tense whenever possible. (Some sentences just have to be passive, but not all.) Use the second person (“you”), and avoid future tense (like “will” or “shall”). Users are “in the moment” when they’re reading your documentation, so you need to write to that aspect. Write as if you were sitting next to the person who will be reading what you write. Here’s a quick test to see if you’re using active or passive voice. “If you can insert ‘by zombies’ after the verb, you have passive voice.” (From a tweet by Rebecca Johnson @johnsonr) “The screen is displayed [by zombies].” “The information requested [by zombies] should be filed with the application.”
Vocabulary
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When creating your content, use the best word, and use it consistently. (This goes against everything you were taught in the fifth grade. You do NOT want to use a different word each time so that the story is more interesting. You DO want to use the same terms in the same way.) Everyone benefits when you write consistently, but it also helps people with cognitive issues, improves SEO, and provides better translations.
Lists
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Instead of long sentences with lots of comma-delimited terms and phrases, use lists. They’re easier to read. Be sure to use numbered lists for tasks and bulleted lists for generic items (that don’t have to be followed in a set order). And lists should never have only one item.
Easy Tasks - Format
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Much of what we do already addresses some best practices.
Use Left-justified Paragraphs
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Use left-justified text alignment, and do not fully or right-justify text, because this can create “rivers” throughout your paragraphs. Dyslexics find justified text harder to read.
Color Contrast
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Good color contrast makes text and images easier to read and comprehend. WCAG 2.0 suggests a minimum ration of 3:1 for large text and 4.5:1 for other text and images. Black on white, even though it has the maximum color contrast, is actually not the best if you want to reach the largest number of people. Dyslexics find yellow on blue easiest to read, and it still has a decent color contrast. However, most people don’t want to design websites that use yellow text on a blue background. What you can do to help all users is to “tone down” the white background by not using #fff (absolute white). In addition, websites will not look the same in the same browser on different systems, because it depends on the monitor’s color saturation. I use two (identical) monitors on my desktop, and I’ve never been able to match the color settings, so I can drag a browser window from one monitor to the other and watch the site change.
Resizing Text
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To meet WCAG guidelines, the design must allow people to resize text up to 200% without adding horizontal scroll bars. This requires responsive design, which uses fluid (proportional) grids. Also, be sure to restrict the number of font families to three, and try (as much as possible) to use consistent sizes for images.
Techniques
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Here are some other things that you can do to create more accessible content.
Keyboard Functionality
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Make sure that the deliverable is accessible by keyboard. On the Web, can you use the TAB key to get to the next link? Can you use the TAB key and arrows to select a specific menu item? Are keyboard shortcuts available?
Captions and Transcripts
It Gets Better: Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles “True Colors”
NASA | Operation IceBridge Flies the Ice Caps
Osama Bin Laden Dead: Obama Speech Video and Transcript
Hamlet IRS Tax Tips: Direct Deposit
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- Only people with no visual or hearing impairments can really enjoy a video without captions, transcripts, or audio descriptions. - Captions help those who cannot hear for any reason. They could be deaf or hard-of-hearing…or they could work in a quiet or a noisy environment where it isn’t feasible to add sound. Thanks to Ken Harrenstien, YouTube videos can now include machine-generated captions. It is also possible to upload a text file of the spoken words. Google will convert the text file into captions to match the written words with the video. Karen Mardahl of the AccessAbility SIG wrote an article for the January 2010 issue of Intercom about captioning YouTube videos. - Transcripts display the words being spoken. In addition to the same benefits as captions, they also add search engine optimization benefits. - Audio descriptions further enhance the video by explaining what is happening. It’s like having someone read the script to the person who is listening. For example: [Gibbs slaps Tony on the back of the head.] Tony: Hey! - Videos with sign language are specifically designed for those who understand sign language. YouTube has more than 40,000 ASL videos. The IRS has posted several videos to provide tax information (for example, http://www.youtube.com/user/IRSvideosASL?blend=3&ob=5: IRS in ALS).
Don’t Remove :focus
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When a link style is defined with :focus, you can provide customized formatting to those who navigate with keystrokes. As users tab through the links, the current link (the one with the focus) uses different formatting that other links. Suckerfish provides instructions and a demo that shows how it works. The link with the blue background has the focus, while the underlined link is in the hover state (that is, the mouse was over the underlined link). Note: Years ago, web designers tended to disable :focus (that is, set it to not display) because it was considered “ugly”. However, :focus is a feature that helps people with vision and cognitive issues know where to click. Please don’t disable :focus! If you don’t like how it looks, use CSS to reformat it.
Alt Attributes
<img src=“file.png” width=“200” height=“200” />
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The “alt” attribute describes images to people using screen readers (or those with slow connections who disable images). This image doesn’t have an alt attribute, so there is no information. (Some screen readers may read the file name from the source.)
Other Issues To be Aware Of
Link text Tables Forms
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Other Resources
Conferences and Unconferences http://www.accessibilitycamp.org/ CSUN
Twitter (#a11y) WCAG 2.0 WebAIM
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Questions and Answers
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? ? ? ? ?
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Thank you!
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