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Making content readable
Let's start with a question. You can click the radio button to show your answer but nothing will happen. I'm not collecting data on this. It's just for fun.
If you are reading this post, I'm guessing you either like or love reading. We are the lucky ones! So much of our education and work depends on reading. For those that enjoy it, life is good! What about those that find reading difficult though? How can we support them and make the process easier?
Published: 18 April 2025
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Helping users navigate
We love travelling! There is nothing more exciting to me than setting off in our motorhome on a road trip. It doesn't matter whether it's a new place or somewhere we've been before, one of the challenges we always face is navigating. How do we find our way? Will we find the places we want to visit? Will we find our overnight places? Who drives and who navigates? Navigating is critical to making the trip a success.
Documents, whether Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF, often contain a lot of information. Often, we don't want to read every single word, from start to finish. We need to find the parts that are of interest. Sometimes, we need to find a particular thing that we have read before. Helping users to find what they need is very important. We need to help users navigate our documents.
Published: 12 April 2025
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Making documents adaptable
I often receive emails with this line in the signature, I make my emails accessible by using Arial font size 12.
This shows very poor understanding of accessibility. They are right, it is good practice to use a clear, sans-serif font. It is also right to choose a font size that most people can read. These do not make a document accessible though.
Wherever possible, your document will be more accessible if you allow users to adapt it. What makes writing for neurodiversity quite difficult, is that everybody is different. What enables one person to access content might make it more difficult for another. The first key is to allow users to change the way content looks.
Published: 6 April 2025
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Documents for neurodiversity
I've been thinking about writing this series for a while now. I've noticed that more people are now aware of things like alt text, heading structures and meaningful link text to enable screen reader users to access content. In general, awareness of colour contrast has also improved. What I see less evidence of, is understanding of neurodiversity and how we can improve the user experience for people with cognitive impairments or who are neurodivergent. So I'm writing this series to address some of the issues that I think are really important to understand.
Published: 4 April 2025
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Goodbye 2024
I don't usually do this, but I wanted to share my reflections on the last year and some of the things I've learned. In many ways, 2024 has been a good year for me, though it has had some challenges. I'll break it down into different life categories and share some thoughts on each. These are in no particular order of importance.
Published: 1 January 2025
The Western Front - part 2
Sunday 10th November is Remembrance Sunday in the UK. We spent that day visiting some of the sites around Ypres. We had a long list of places to visit but we didn't have time to get to all of them. Hopefully, one day, we'll return to the ones we missed.
Published: 14 December 2024
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The Western Front - part 1
A year or so back, I asked Neil if there was anywhere he fancied for our first motorhome trip abroad. He was quick to answer. The Western Front and the 1st world war battle sites. So we booked it, packed it, etc.
When I started writing this, I realised it was going to be a very long post, so I decided to break it up into sections. This first post will be about Poperinge and the three places we visited there. These visits took place on Saturday 9th November 2024.
Published: 30 November 2024
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Outlook Accessibility
Outlook is mostly used for emails, so what could we possibly get wrong here? To be fair, most simple text emails should be okay, but there are plenty of times that emails are anything but simple. Then we can bring in the Outlook Calendar. This is another very handy tool, that enables us to invite people to meetings and events. How can we do that in an accessible way?
Published: 18 August 2024
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PDF Accessibility
If there's one thing that will get Accessibility Specialists arguing amongst themselves, it is PDFs. There seems to be a PDF accessibility spectrum. At one end are those who condemn all PDFs as completely inaccessible, the spawn of the devil, never to be used again. At the other end are a group of accessibility people, who bombard my LinkedIn messaging system with offers to make every PDF in my organisation 100% accessible. They offer compliance with every law known to man and don't understand why I don't bite their hands off. I'm somewhere in the middle. We live in a world that includes PDFs so it makes sense to ensure that they are accessible to as many people as possible.
In this post, I want to share some tips to make your PDF as accessible as possible. To do this properly, you need Adobe Acrobat Pro(the paid for version). If you haven't got this, I would not really recommend creating PDFs but if you absolutely have to, at least follow the first two tips and that will be better than nothing.
Published: 10 August 2024
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PowerPoint Accessibility
PowerPoint is a fantastic application for displaying slides to support a presentation, whether face-to-face or online. However, it often gets used for purposes that it isn't intended for, such as creating reports and dashboards. So before I even begin, the first thing I would advise you to do, is question whether PowerPoint is the right tool for the job.
Making PowerPoint slides accessible can involve a lot of work and really knowing how to use PowerPoint well. I'm going to assume that the principles we've already looked at in Word and Excel still apply to PowerPoint. So give your images alt text, give your slides a meaningful name, and if you display data, provide the raw data as well as a graph.
Published: 4 August 2024
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