Plain English and Clear Screens
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Written by Atila on September 24, 2008 – 5:34 pm
As already stated, there are ways in which end-users can adjust their screen colour, font and text size. However, clear linguistic design short sentences, clear headings and wellstructured content is the responsibility of the information provider. It is crucial that headers, list items and sentences are ended with proper punctuation, because screenreaders run text on until it is punctuated. They do the same thing after a link, so insert a few spaces in the source code to avoid problems with text losing its meaning. Dates should be presented in universal formats: put August 10th 2000 or 10 August 2000 rather than 10–08–00 or 10/8/00 to prevent confusion in countries that do not conform to the British style of placing the month second.
Images: alt Attribute
HTML provides for an alternative text description to be attached to images in a document. The alt attribute in the tag exists to describe the image, but enables the page designer to explain or clarify the site structure to the user by putting extra information in the alt text for link buttons (alt=“news” can be replaced by alt=“link to News section”). Text should be short and instructive and should contribute to the page as a whole rather than simply being a long description of an image as this may actually disrupt the flow of the page as it is being read out.
Images Versus Eye-Candy
Illustrations that are purely decorative (eye-candy) should be ‘disappeared’ by using alt=“ ”, while images with contextual relevance can be given a useful text alternative. Although you can provide a long, detailed explanation using the alt attribute some browsers will not wrap alt text and may limit how much of it is displayed without scrolling or simply truncate it. Short is therefore best.
Image Maps
Clickable images with multiple links can be problematic to screen-readers: provide a text link to a menu list of the links in the image either on the same page or on a text-only alternative page. If this link disrupts the design of the page consider using an invisible GIF with a useful text description as a link, or even a set of invisible GIFs as an alternative to the image map. Either way the alt statement for the image should be helpful. Client-side image maps allow for alt statements for each coordinate, but an alternative text list or a link to a text-based page will be easier for the Lynx screenreader to translate.
