Accessibility

There are a few things you should think about to make life easier for people whose hearing or vision is impaired, especially when you’re writing for anything digital. 

Don’t rely only on design.

Red and green buttons aren’t great for people with colour blindness. Subtle contrasts are hard for people with visual impairment to see. So add written cues and labels to help people navigate websites, emails and apps. 

Go for full words, rather than abbreviations.

Things like ‘etc’ and ‘eg’ aren’t just a little jargon-y. They’re also hard for screen readers to pick up properly. For example, a lot of screen reader programmes pick up ‘eg’ as ‘egg’.

Don’t forget the metadata.

Metadata is a lot of things. But for a website, think of it like the commentary: the descriptions of photos, the navigation. People who use screen readers rely on metadata to get a sense of things like images, or how a page is laid out. So don’t stop at the words – work on the metadata, too.