2. Write for your audience
For consideration
Beyond how your users will access your content, accessible content also applies to how they will perceive it.
While you won’t necessarily cover the gamut of providing content for people across all levels of cognition, it’s imperative to consider your target audience and regular users and how to best communicate with them.
Your efforts here could begin with excluding language your audience won’t understand from your content.
Such messaging may include industry terms or jargon, complex words or phrases, abbreviations, or vernacular suited only to a subset of your audience.
Suggested additional resource
GOV.UK's guide to Content design: planning, writing and managing content includes further excellent recommendations on knowing your audience, how people read, and ways of adapting content to support understanding and engagement.
Suggested additional resource
One way to check if your site or content is easy-to-understand is to run it through a reading comprehension tool using the Flesch-Kincaid formula (a common form of scoring the reading level of content).
More about abbreviations
A general rule for writing abbreviations in documents is to write out the term followed by the acronym in parentheses to introduce them. After the introduction, you can continue to use the abbreviation throughout the document.
Following this process on a website creates a new challenge since abbreviations can appear on multiple pages, and you have no control over the first page a user will browse.
Otherwise, you can type out the full abbreviation on each page, following the general rule above on a per-page basis, or use the abbreviation tag <abbr> when adding content to your site.
How the abbreviation tag works
Here’s how that works if you’re using adding content to your site using a text editor (or What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor) that includes a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or code view:
- Switch the editor to the HTML view (a button usually lets you do this with a quick click).
- Find your abbreviation in the HTML view. Let’s say the abbreviation is “HTML.”
- Wrap the abbreviation in the following tag, as follows:
<abbr title=“Hypertext Markup Language”>HTML</abbr> - Switch back to the regular text editor view, and the abbreviation will appear underlined. If you hover your mouse over the abbreviation, the cursor will turn into a question mark, and a popup will appear with the full phrase.
In this example, the <abbr> tag has been added to the text “ADHD”. ADHD shows as a dotted underline in Google Chrome. Hovering over the text “ADHD” with your mouse pointer reveals an overlay of the abbreviation: "Adult attention-deficity/hyperactvity disorder”.
Device considerations
The <abbr> tag doesn’t work as well on touch devices as on desktops and laptops, so finding ways to avoid abbreviations without explanation within your content remains the best approach.
Technical considerations
Not all content management systems (CMS) will allow the ability to add the <abbr> tag or properly enable this on a website, so the technical team must confirm the ability to achieve this.