Overview

Tips

1. Use sentence case in everything you put on the website.  The use of block capitals for emphasis makes it much harder to read your website using a screen reader. Be sure to use the styling options available to provide structure to your page body text:
   
   
   
   
2. Posters containing words and images are not great for accessibility unless they are saved as PDF's.  It's essential to include the key information as text within the page itself.  You can still attach your poster as well.
   
   
3. Images containing words are not accessible and should not be used. Instead, the details should be in the body of the page. 
   
   
4. Be sure to include alt text for all images that you use - this tells people using a screen reader what the image shows.  It  also helps search engines understand images and improved search results.
   
1. Alt text should be:
   
1. Short and specific
   
2. ​Descriptive but not wordy
   
3. ​Focused on what matters in the image
   
   
5. You should save a document as a PDF rather than print it to make it more accessible. You can check your documents for accessibility when saving as PDF from Word (if you're using word).
   
   
6. Meetings: we'd always recommend that you put the agenda and minutes in the body text of the page not just add these as attachments.  Tables are not easy for screen readers to read so agendas should not be presented in table format.
   
   
7. Finances: whilst many of the documents will be difficult to make accessible, the file names of the attachments should be in sentence case and should be descriptive for someone using a screen reader.  It would be helpful to explain in the body of the page what documents you have attached and what each contains.
   
   
8. Governance and Policies: make sure to include accessible PDF's wherever possible and to include the body of the document in the main page body wherever possible.