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Content Accessibility and Design

Digital accessibility expands beyond the subsections below. You can use best practices in your everyday life when writing emails or making a social media post. Apply the general guidelines below to all digital content or find application-specific guidelines.

To create a welcoming digital environment, designers, developers, and content editors need to be aware of and well-versed in accessibility standards and techniques for meeting those standards.

Accessibility Checklist

Utilize an accessibility checklist when building webpages to help implement best practices across your whole site.

Training opportunities are available to Northwestern University course instructors, faculty, staff, and students who build and maintain digital assets.

View the Accessibility Checklist

Five Best Practices for All Digital Content

  1. Use alt tag descriptions for images.
  2. Use descriptive links that make sense out of context instead of text like "see more" or "click here."
  3. Use headings to organize your content and make sure they are used in the correct order.
  4. Designate row and/or column headers when using a table.
  5. Always add closed captioning to videos.

Article-Specific Best Practices

  • Images: Accessible images allow users of assistive technologies equal access to information provided by an image.
  • Headings: For assistive technology users who use screen readers and keyboards to access and navigate web content, headings are a tool to allow scanning of information. Headings enable the user to more quickly understand site architecture, page structure and site organization.
  • Links: The web audience that uses assistive technologies can access web links easily by listing links and tabbing through them if the links are marked up correctly.
  • Tables: A screen reader reads each cell of the table out loud, left to right and top to bottom. Accessible markup is necessary to ensure that the assistive technology user can obtain accurate table data.
  • Electronic Documents: For an inclusive user experience, it is important to make sure that the documents that link from your site are accessible.
  • Video & Audio: Any videos or audio recordings that are created for a course must have captions and/or a transcript available. In a sense, captions and transcripts are another form of alternative text for deaf and hard-of-hearing users.
  • Writing: Adhering to best practices for web writing will enable all audiences to quickly scan and efficiently locate web information.