• Use short, simple sentences in a direct style.
• Avoid complex language and jargon.
• Consider using short paragraphs.
• Put the main point of sentence or paragraph into the beginning of the sentence or paragraph.
• Use section headings to organize the content.
• Limit the amount of content on a page to avoid scrolling.
• Avoid using italics in the main body of the text.
• Avoid underlining large blocks of text as it makes reading harder.
• Use a minimum of text size 12pt or 14pt.
• Avoid formatting texts in large-width columns.
• Use an off-white color for your background, like light gray or tan; use dark gray for text instead of pure black.
• Use a plain, evenly spaced sans serif font such as Arial and Comic Sans.

Visual Appearance

• Use left-justified text with ragged right edge.
• Use an off-white color for your background, like light gray or tan; use dark gray for text instead of pure black.
• Use a plain, evenly spaced sans serif font such as Arial and Comic Sans.
• Avoid using italics in the main body of the text.
• Use bolding to highlight in order to emphasize keywords and concepts.
• Avoid underlining large blocks of text as it makes reading harder.
• Avoid using more than one whitespace after period.
• Use a minimum of text size 12pt or 14pt.
• Avoid capital letters, apart from the beginning of sentences, abbreviations, and where it is grammatically correct.
• Ensure navigation menus use a text size that allows for comfortable reading.
• Whenever text highlighting is needed, consider using boxes, border, and background color to call user attention.
• Keep the between-line spacing of 1.5 point.
• In the body of text, always underline hyperlinks as users expect to be able to recognise hyperlinked text or images.
• Avoid the fonts in which letters like b-d or p-q are perfectly mirrored letters.
• Ensure navigation menus differ visually from the main body of webpage.
• Avoid fonts with unusually shaped letters.
• Avoid splitting words at the end of a sentence, i.e. do not use hyphens.
• Use enough white space between webpage elements.
• Ensure high luminance contrast between text and background, with the luminance of one 7 times the luminance of the other. The rule doesn’t apply to low-relevance, decorative visual elements.
• Ensure webpage elements (buttons, links, icons, etc.) that have the same function also have the same look.
• Keep the white space between paragraphs of at least 1.5 times the space between text lines.
• Avoid formatting texts in large-width columns, especially Asian logogram texts.
• Ensure visited links are visually distinct from unvisited links. Visited links are often given in a purple colour.
• Avoid using blinking or moving text.
• Avoid dynamic menus or menus that use transparency, because users with dyslexia may find hard to contrast them with the background partially visible.

Structure of Content

• If appropriate, use bullets or numbers rather than continuous prose.
• Use graphics, images, and pictures to break up text, whilst remembering that graphics should be relevant to the material and not distract from the content.
• Use short, simple sentences in a direct style.
• Use active rather than passive voice.
• Avoid complex language and jargon.
• Consider using short paragraphs.
• Avoid images that are ‘busy’, cluttered, include irrelevant or too much extra detail.
• Avoid placing images above text or text around images.
• Place the main point at the very top of page. Place any other important information above the fold, to minimize the risk of users losing their place after scrolling.
• Place important content in a single main column, so users don’t have to scan the page and pick out design elements in a two-dimensional layout.
• Be conscious of where sentences begin on the page. Starting a new sentence at the end of a line makes it harder to follow.
• Provide clear intuitive categories for menus and links.
• Put the main point of sentence or paragraph into the beginning of the sentence or paragraph.
• Always put the search box in a clear obvious position, usually the top of the page.
• Limit the amount of content on a page to avoid scrolling.
• Ensure Web pages have titles that describe their topic or purpose.
• Ensure the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone, without reading much text before the link.
• Ensure headings and labels concisely describe the topic or purpose of page sections and elements.
• Use section headings to organize the content.
• Arrange the items on index pages in a logical order (e.g., by function); avoid exclusively using the alphabetical order.
• When building a site index, use visualizations revealing hierarchy of website pages.
• Provide a printer-friendly version of webpage.
• Let the user change text and background colors, and enlarge text.
• Provide users enough time to read and use content; avoid setting time limits on reading.

Navigation

• Embed in Webpage texts the hyperlinks to the pages with the text-related concepts.
• Use text and symbolism for navigational elements that are truly representational or a well-known concept e.g. a house for home.
• Use a breadcrumb trail (e.g., “Home page > section 1 > sub-section 1.1”) to let the user understand their location on a website.
• Ensure navigation menus group information by function.
• Avoiding nested menus (e.g., containing items, sub items, sub-sub items, etc.); opt for broader one-level menus.
• Allow the user to go back and re-read information.

Functionality

• Include in your website common “helper” pages, such as homepage, contact us, site map, references and links, copyright and disclaimer, and accessibility statement pages.
• Offer internal search on a website; provide self-completion, and orthographic verification to point errors and ease correction.
• Avoid horizontal scrolling on webpages.
• Ensure navigation buttons and links that are repeated on multiple pages of a website occur in the same relative order and similar position across the webpages.

Simplification of Text

• Use the lists of dos and don’ts, which are more useful than continuous text to highlight aspects of good practice.
• Provide a version of regular texts, which doesn’t require reading ability more advanced than the lower secondary education level.

• Use visual and semantic space.
  • Space is an important visual design tool that helps us identify groups of related content and delineate unrelated content.
  • Non-visual users benefit from “space” that is created using semantic markup (see Solid Structure).
• Provide the right amount of space between lines of text.
  • A line-height value of 1.3 to 1.5 is optimal, depending on the font.
• Use clean typography. Avoid changing the typeface from that specified by the website.
• Avoid using all caps.
  • Readability is reduced with all caps because all words have a uniform rectangular shape, meaning readers can’t identify words by their shape.
• Don’t underline text.
  • Reserve underlining for identifying links.
• Use left-aligned text.
  • Justified text can produce readability issues for people with dyslexia and other conditions that affect reading and comprehension.
  • Justified text can produce unevenly enlarged spaces between certain words, sometimes known as “rivers”.
• Support text resizing.
  • Check how your content responds to enlarged text.
  • Avoid using narrow columns of content because they will not respond well to scaling.
    • However, measures that are too wide make it difficult for readers to scan back to find the start of the following line.
  • While accessibility requirements do not mandate use of specific fonts, be aware that people who have online reading difficulties benefit from body text set using a clear, consistently formed and balanced sans-serif font.