Juniper Websites: How can I make text accessible in my website?

Overview

This article explains how to enhance your use of text formatting to make your website accessible. When creating and modifying content, it's best practice to use headings and bulleted/numbered lists effectively:

  1. Heading styles help structure your pages logically, making the content easier for screen reader users to navigate to specific sections on the page. Often people make heading text stand out using inline formatting, for example, bold, italic and underline. If you do not use heading styles, screen readers cannot always differentiate inline formatted text as headings, making navigation of the content impossible for screen reader users.
  2. Bulleted/Numbered Lists also help to structure the content on a page. Each bullet point/number in a list indicates one item making the content clearer to understand. When a person without a visual impairment reads a list, the layout enhances the clarity of the content. When a screen reader user listens to a document being read out, each bulleted/numbered point is read out distinctly. This prevents words from merging and brings clarity to the content. Lists also help navigation - users can understand how many items are in a list and navigate from list to list in the content.

Instructions

    1. Review any headings and sub-headings on your web pages to ensure they use heading styles. 
    2. Where you find headings that use inline formatting, replace them with the correct heading style (for example, Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, Heading 5) and save your changes.
      1. Select the text you want to make into a heading
      2. Select Style (Normal) from the Edit toolbar and select the appropriate Heading:
    3. Save your changes.
    4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 to create more headings as needed.

      When doing this, make sure that you use appropriate heading levels, for example, do not jump from Heading 2 to Heading 4 without using Heading 3 as this will cause accessibility issues.

    1. Review your content to see if any text has been made to look like bulleted/numbered lists on your website pages, for example, paragraphs may have been made to look like lists using symbols or numbers. 
    2. Where you find text manually formatted to look like a bulleted/numbered list, replace it with a bulleted/numbered list.
      1. Select the text you want to make into a bulleted/numbered list
      2. Select either the Insert/Remove Bulleted List or Insert/Remove Numbered List icon from the Edit toolbar to create the list:
    3. Save your changes.
    4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 to create more bulleted/numbered lists as needed.

Related information

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