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Topic : Re: How to make documentation accessible to vision-impaired audiences? Nowadays, governments and corporations alike are putting an ever-increasing number of accessibility laws in place to ensure that - selfpublishingguru.com

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I think Sejal and Chenmunka hit a lot of the points that are important when writing for audiences with disabilities. I would add that it's also important to have your content well-tagged semantically. By that, I mean that a screen reading tool needs to know how to interpret the information it's reading. Otherwise it's just a jumble of words and it's difficult to understand the importance of each piece of information or how to navigate through the information to find what you need.

So, you want to have your titles, section titles, tables, figures, and everything else really well-tagged so that information can be conveyed to the end-user and they can understand the relevance of each part of the documentation as it's read to them.

Adobe has some tools for tagging content that can help you achieve this in PDF. HTML tends to have more inherent tagging of content (H1, H2, etc.).

Another option is to source your content in a more structured format, such as XML/DITA. This adds some structure to your content by default and also provides built-in mechanisms for making your content more accessible, such as adding alternative text to images.

Additionally, if you start with structured content, the publishing output is usually separated from the writing process, so once you get your styling right in the publishing plugin, you can ensure that everything you publish will be consistent and accessible.

Webaim.org has quite a few free tools that can check your content for accessibility issues. These two are a couple of my favorites:

wave.webaim.org/ - Check any website for accessibility issues webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ - Check for color contrast issues


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