Inclusive marketing and communications consultant, accessibility strategist, speaker, author
Making content readable is one of the easiest things you can do to ensure your content is accessible and provides the best reading experience for a diversity of users. Here are the content dos and don'ts in one image. The left side of the image shows what works. The right side of the image shows what does not work. Here's a short explanation for each one. ✅ Text Alignment Full justification is a problem. It adds unpredictable rivers of uneven white space, which adds friction as the eye can get lost with no guidance from the ends of the lines that are in a straight line. Beware centering text with more than two lines adds friction to the reading experience. Even for people without disabilities. It's because the starting point for each line varies. The eyes work harder to find the next line than they do when the starting point is the same. Be thoughtful about centering. ✅ Paragraphs Some content contains long paragraphs or doesn't add a blank line between paragraphs. In some posts on LinkedIn, a user hits "Enter" only once between paragraphs. That looks like this line, the one before this, and the next one. The blank line helps break up the text for easier reading. Doesn't the blank line make a difference? Keep digital paragraphs about two to five sentences long with a blank line in between. ✅ Bold, Italics, Underline It's OK to italicize a word or two for emphasis or to identify titles of books, shows, and publications. They're not meant for entire sentences or paragraphs. Bold is fine for headlines and headings. But some content has an entire sentence or paragraph in bold. I know they're trying to tell the reader, "If you're going to scan this, here's what's important." Except if the reader wants to read more of it, the bolded text can be distracting. I don't have ADHD and my eyes keep gravitating to the bolded text instead of reading what's before and after it. It's like a tug-of-war. The same goes for underlined text. Underlined text can be hard for some people to read. Do use them for links, but try to limit links to a few words that give context rather than a whole sentence if possible. ❎ UPPERCASE Avoid UPPERCASE as much as possible. Use sentence case, title case, and PascalCase for hashtags and user names. (Capitalize the FirstLetterOfEachWord.) Text in all UPPERCASE has no shape. They all show up as a block. Using lowercase adds shape and improves readability. ✅ Font Style Use simple, clean, sans-serif (no curves and embellishes) fonts for the best reading experience. 🔔 Tap the profile bell to get the next post 👉 Follow #MerylMots to catch my content ❤️ Like this? Repost and comment 📧 Subscribe to an occasional email at meryl[.]net/subscribe #DigitalMarketing #ContentMarketing Image: Content Dos and Don'ts with the left side containing examples of what to do and the right side showing examples of what not to do to make content readable. Clearly, I don't have an eye for design!