How to Make Your Documents Accessible: A Plain English Checklist

Who This Actually Affects

It is easy to picture accessibility as something for a small number of people with a specific diagnosis. In practice the group is much larger and includes a lot of readers who would never describe themselves as disabled at all.

Around one person in ten is dyslexic. Millions more have some degree of visual impairment, and many more again have colour vision deficiency. Then there is everyone reading on a phone in bright sunlight, everyone whose first language is not English, everyone concentrating through pain or exhaustion, and everyone who is simply tired at the end of a long day. An accessible document is not a special version for a minority. It is a better document for everybody.

There is a legal dimension too, particularly for public sector organisations in the UK, where accessibility requirements apply to documents published online. The GOV.UK guidance on publishing accessible documents is the place to start if that applies to you. For most people though, the reason to do this is simpler. You wrote something because you wanted it read.

The Checklist

1. Use real headings, not just big bold text

This is the single most important item on the list, and the most commonly skipped. Making text large and bold looks like a heading to you. To a screen reader it is just a sentence in a bigger font, which means someone navigating by structure cannot jump between sections at all. They have to listen to the whole thing in order.

Use the actual heading styles in your word processor, and use them in order. Heading 1 for the title, Heading 2 for major sections, Heading 3 for subsections. Do not skip levels because you preferred the look of the smaller one.

2. Write in plain English

Plain English is not dumbing down. It is respecting the reader's time. Shorter sentences, everyday words where they will do, and the main point at the start of the paragraph rather than the end. If a sentence needs reading twice to parse the grammar, it needs rewriting regardless of who is reading it.

3. Get the contrast right

Light grey text on white looks elegant in a design mock up and is genuinely hard to read for a great many people. Aim for strong contrast between text and background as standard, and check anything you are unsure about with a free contrast checker. Pale text over a photograph is the most common offender.

4. Never let colour carry the meaning on its own

If red means overdue and green means fine, that distinction vanishes for a reader with colour vision deficiency, and disappears entirely if the document is printed in black and white. Always pair colour with something else: a word, a symbol, bold text, a different shape. Colour should reinforce meaning, not be the only place it lives.

5. Describe your images

Every image that carries information needs alternative text describing what it shows. Not the file name, and not simply the word chart. Describe the point the image is making, because that is what a reader using a screen reader actually needs. If an image is purely decorative, mark it as such so it can be skipped rather than announced pointlessly.

This is one of the more tedious jobs in a long document, which is precisely why it gets skipped. Generating a first draft description automatically and then editing it is far more likely to actually happen than writing every one from scratch.

6. Make link text say where it goes

A page full of links that all read click here is close to useless for anyone listening to it, because screen reader users often navigate by pulling up a list of the links on their own. Write the destination into the link itself. Read our guide on making text easier to read tells you exactly what you are getting. Click here does not.

7. Use proper lists and proper tables

Hyphens typed at the start of lines look like a list but are not one. Use the real list tool so the structure is announced correctly. For tables, mark your header row as a header row, keep the layout simple, and avoid merged cells wherever you can. Never use a table purely to position things on the page.

8. Choose a readable font and give it room

Stick to clear, familiar typefaces at a reasonable size, and be generous with line spacing. Crowded lines are harder for everyone and considerably harder for dyslexic readers. Our piece on how fonts affect reading goes into what the evidence actually supports, including the honest position on dyslexia specific fonts. The British Dyslexia Association publishes a style guide worth bookmarking.

9. Offer more than one format

A PDF is fine as one option and poor as the only one. PDFs are often difficult to resize on a phone, frequently lose their structure, and can be impossible to navigate if they were produced by scanning. Publishing an HTML or Word version alongside costs almost nothing and gives people a version they can actually adapt. Our guide to exporting documents to PDF, EPUB and HTML covers doing this quickly.

10. Test it by listening to it

This is the fastest quality check available and hardly anyone does it. Have your document read aloud and follow along. You will immediately hear the sentence that runs on too long, the acronym you never expanded, the heading that makes no sense out of context, and the image that leaves a silent gap where information should be. Five minutes of listening finds more problems than an hour of rereading, because your eyes forgive things your ears will not.

A Realistic Way to Work Through It

Do not try to retrofit everything you have ever written. Start with the documents that get read most, apply the checklist to those, and then build the habits into how you write new ones. Headings and link text cost nothing once they are habitual. Alt text and contrast take a little thought. Alternative formats take one extra export.

It also helps to see your own document the way a struggling reader sees it. Open it, increase the text size substantially, switch on a dark background or a colour overlay, and try reading it. Anything that becomes awkward at that point is worth fixing, because someone is reading it that way already.

If you are writing for a specific audience, two of our other guides go deeper. Accessible reading for dyslexia and ADHD covers what those readers actually need, and sensory friendly reading tools covers predictability and sensory load. If you want the technical standard behind all of this, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative is the authoritative source.

And if your own reading is the thing that is hard rather than your writing, reading with brain fog and reading academic papers faster approach the same problem from the reader's side. The Type Shifter tutorial shows how to set any of this up.

Frequently Asked Questions