Wayfinding

When you’re a public space, wayfinding signage might help you find a washroom. When looking for a piece of information on a website, wayfinding clues can help you locate a button or a form. Just like with a public space, the more complex the layout of your website, the greater the need for wayfinding clues to help visitors navigate to specific sections or elements of your content. The tricky thing about websites is that they adjust based on the device that’s used to access them. Some visitors will read your website’s content using a screen reader. For visually impaired or blind persons, wayfinding can be a challenge online as much as offline.

Therefore, it’s best not to rely on colour, shape, or relative location of content as wayfinding clues. You don’t want to say that a button is “in the right column” because that column might be stacked above or below on mobile devices. You also don’t want to say “click the blue link” or “click the round button”. Neither would be obvious to someone who doesn’t rely on sight to navigate your website.

Instead, it’s best to review why wayfinding is necessary for a particular element or piece of content. If the page is very complex, simplifying it could be the best answer to making that content easy to find.

Text line width

Modern CMSs often offer multiple widths for sections and columns of content. This is wonderful for flexible storytelling but can become an accessibility concern. Long lines of text are notoriously more difficult to read. This is because long lines of text are perceived as overwhelming. It also takes more cognitive effort to find the beginning of the next line when you finish reading the current line when the line width is quite long. (Read Baymard Institute’s study on text line width)

With this in mind, keeping columns of text within 45-80 characters per line including spaces and punctuation is best. However, if your content is in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean the line width should be no longer than 40 characters.

There are great tools to help you test line widths. The thing to keep in mind is to view your content on a few devices. Ideally, a large external monitor will show you the widest any section of content can be on your page. However, checking on the most commonly used devices (according to your site’s analytics) and mobile devices should cover cases when lines might get too narrow as well.

Colour contrast

Making your content easy to interact with for visitors with low vision or colour blindness is a cornerstone of web accessibility. Ideally, your trusted web designer has provided you with guidelines on your brand palette’s accessible colour combinations. However, that’s not always the case. Or you might be working on a new project with extended colour applications for a unique feel. Colour palettes should be both, a stable foundation for your brand and a living, flexible toolset to evolve along with your organization.

When working with text-based content – it’s important to check for appropriate contrast between text and background colours. A great tool for this is WebAIM’s contrast checker. Make sure your colour combination passes the level (A, AA, or AAA) listed in your website’s accessibility policy.

When working with graphics – it’s important to check for appropriate contrast between the focal point(s) and the background colours. Two great tools to use with graphics and entire websites are:

There are many more great colour contrast tools in our guide to accessibility tools for content managers.

Your turn

While these recommendations only scratch the surface of making your content accessible, they do offer a manageable entry point for building your accessibility practice as a content manager. Once you get used to checking for these considerations as you work on website content, you’ll probably notice them play out on many websites you visit daily.

Read our accessibility guides

We’ve created a series of guides to help you create content that’s optimized for varied and wide audiences:

You can also take all of our accessibility guides with you in form of a PDF:
Download Our Accessibility Checklist for Content Managers

Of course, if you’d like a bit of help, we offer accessibility auditing, training, and on-going support services.

Reach out to us