100 points to know about...
Digital accessibility

Since the previous grain mentioned design principles and tips, this grain will focus on the importance of enabling and designing for assistive tools to make the online experience of visually impaired users as smooth and understandable as possible.

To navigate web pages, visually impaired users may require some of these tools:

• Keyboard-only use
• Screen reader software
• Speech recognition
• Screen magnifier
• Braille devices

Your job as the developer and creator of a digital project is to ensure that you’ve enabled the use of this assistive technology. To learn more about the functions and importance of these tools, refer to Lesson 12 of this module.

However, ensuring that your design and content is compatible with assistive tools is not the entirety of considerations you need to make. In order for these tools to accurately and faithfully interpret the content that you’ve created, you also need to make sure that your design choices are adapted to these tools.

Important design consideration you should make are:

• Add alternative text (alt-text) to images. Alt-text describes an image, thereby helping users who cannot see it identify its elements. To learn more and see an example of the difference that alt-text can make, refer to Lesson 8: Notion 52
• Provide a description for links (for example, do not write simply “Click here” if you would like users to read an article, but provide context with: To read our newest article on web accessibility, visit the News section here)
• Organise content with a visual hierarchy. This means that your titles are marked and would be identified first on the page, followed by headings, subheadings and, finally, the body text. This saves times for users navigating with assistive technology, as they can then quickly decide whether a page contains the information that they need.
• Think about readability: Are there any spelling errors? Have you used the standard conventions for acronyms? Is your punctuation correct? Evaluating your project with these points in mind will ensure that your digital project can be read by assistive tools.