Accessible content matters

A cultural organisation’s digital infrastructure offers huge opportunities to connect with broader and more diverse audiences. Yet, many are inadvertently excluding potential visitors and patrons through inaccessible website content.

What do we mean by accessibility? It’s a broad term, but at its core it’s about making a product, service or environment usable to as wide a range of capabilities as possible.  

Accessibility can be considered through the lens of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which provide international standards and recommendations for making websites more accessible. At Substrakt, we always develop websites that meet these standards, including features such as adding alt text to images, designing with appropriate colour contrast and ensuring keyboard and screen reader users can easily navigate the website.

Permanent, temporary or situational

This stuff is important, of course, but accessibility goes much further. Approximately 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability, ranging from permanent to temporary or situational – often the disability is not visible.

Microsoft offers an Inclusive Design Toolkit – see below – which has a useful graphic to demonstrate the different kinds of disability and shows that anyone can face barriers to access at different times.

The way we use devices, access content and engage with websites changes according to time and circumstances. So an accessible website isn’t just a technical necessity for people using assistive technologies, it benefits all users.

But access needs can conflict such as when “the access need for one person is the opposite of what someone else needs”, as outlined in this helpful article that shares guidance on designing for conflicting access needs. This also needs to be taken into consideration.

Content also plays a critical role in web accessibility. Writing, structuring and presenting content with accessibility in mind ensures you reach everyone in the most usable way possible.

Content accessibility: key principles

There are lots of content-related things to consider.

Language and writing

• Plain language: Use clear, straightforward language. Avoid jargon, complex structures and overly formal writing. Aiming for a readability grade of 8 ensures your content is understandable to a broad audience.
• Inclusive language: Reflect diversity by using inclusive language that resonates with people from varied socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.
• Avoid assumptions: Work with neuro-divergent and other access users during research and design to understand their needs and use the language they prefer. Embrace human diversity as a resource for better design, rejecting the concept of ‘average users’.
• Hierarchy: Start with the essential information your audience needs, then provide supporting details, background, context etc.

Presenting written content

• Headings: Break content into digestible sections using descriptive headings. Properly formatted headings (e.g., <h1>, <h2>) aid both sighted users and assistive technology in navigating your site (more on this below).
• Bullets and lists: Use bullets or numbered lists where appropriate, using the list styles in your web editor (rather than creating your own using spaces and dashes).
• Text formatting: Avoid overusing bold or italic text, as it disrupts readability. Steer clear of all caps, as lowercase letters offer more distinctive shapes, making text easier to recognise.
• Simplify layout: Reduce cognitive load by breaking up text, staggering information, simplifying layouts and removing unnecessary elements. This is particularly helpful for neurodivergent users.

Headings

Headings are more than just about the appearance of your content; they are fundamental to web accessibility. They not only help sighted users scan the page and find information quickly, but they also include markup which is essential for assistive technologies to be able to navigate a web page.

Think of headings like chapters and sub chapters of a book. You want them to be organised logically and hierarchically

• Use one <h1> per page to denote the main title.
• Employ a logical hierarchy: <h2> for sections and <h3> or subsections.
• Avoid skipping levels (e.g., jumping from <h2> to <h4>), as this confuses assistive technologies.

Link text

• Be specific with link text. Instead of ‘Click here’, use descriptive phrases like ‘View our upcoming events’.
• Ensure links make sense in isolation; screen reader users often navigate through links independently.
• Avoid overloading sentences with inline links, as they disrupt reading flow.

Images and multimedia

Visual content improves engagement, but it must be accessible:

• Alt text: write concise, descriptive alt text for informational images. Skip unnecessary phrases like ‘Image of’.
• Subtitles and transcripts: provide subtitles for videos with dialogue and transcripts for audio content, ensuring access for deaf or hard-of-hearing users.
• Avoid text in images: Text embedded in images is often unreadable by assistive technologies. Use actual text whenever possible.

PDFs

• HTML-first: Publish content as a web page first, as PDFs are often inaccessible and challenging to navigate on screens.
• Alternatives: For essential PDFs (eg printable resources), provide a summary or full content on a web page.

Clear and inclusive access information

It’s really important that cultural organisations provide clear and concise access information, so people have all the information they need when visiting your website and/or venue.

• Specificity: provide detailed information about accessibility features at your venue and outline limitations.
• Multiple formats: Present access details using words, images and videos to cater for varied user preferences.
• Footer links: Include access information in your website footer for easy discovery.

Accessible content improves usability for everyone, while ensuring compliance with legal and ethical standards. It also improves your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO), as accessible content by default aligns with best practices for metadata, structure and usability.

Make accessibility a priority

Accessibility is a journey, it’s not a task you tick off once and it’s done. It takes time, regular maintenance and an openness to change. Regularly evaluate your content, seek feedback from users with a range of access needs and provide training for your team to keep accessibility front of mind.

Creating a culture of care for accessibility starts with understanding and empathy. When you put yourself in the shoes of users with different access needs and get a sense of the barriers they face, it will change how you think about the online experiences you create.

By prioritising accessibility, cultural organisations can build deeper connections with more people – feels like a no brainer.