This resource is an archived version of the Readability Guidelines.
New wiki is at: readabilityguidelines.myxwiki.org
This is a collaborative project to develop inclusive, evidence-based, universal style guidance. Created by Sarah Richards from Content Design London.
Topics
Clear language
Plain English
Sentence structure
Sentence length
Specialist terms
Legal
Words to avoid/jargon
Headings
Links
CTA (calls to action) and buttons
Writing for mobile
Punctuation and numbers
Capitals
Abbreviations and acronyms
Ampersands
Dashes and hyphens
Contractions
Numbers
People
Writing about people
Use of I/We/You: audience labels
Social media
Get involved
Explore and contribute:
- watch the London Accessibility MeetUp Readability Guidelines talk
- read the Alpha summary and the final Beta update
- share usability studies and academic research evidence on topic wiki page
- add to Slack discussions: readabilityguidelines.slack.com, join: bit.ly/2D0OW1F
- follow #ReadabilityGuidelines on Twitter and LinkedIn
Top level findings
1. Use simple sentences: complex sentences take more brain power to process, make readability more difficult for low literacy level users and are harder to translate.
2. Avoid capitalising words: people are more used to reading lowercase letters so comprehension is slower for capitalised words.
3. In paragraphs, keep link text to the end of the sentence whenever possible. This reduces distraction and cognitive load. It can work better for users with autism. Some of this research comes from the 20th London Accessibility Meetup. The previous sentence is an example of positioning links at the end of a sentence.
4. Avoid abbreviations and acronyms except where users know them better in abbreviated form, for example GIF and 5KB. This reduces user confusion.
5. Avoid referencing gender or age: it’s generally not necessary and can easily make your content non-inclusive.
6. Choose respectful vocabulary: research what language could be emotive for your users by exploring forums, blogs and social media, and carrying out user testing.
7. Readability best practices, like using plain, simple language, short sentences, active tense, good grammar and accurate punctuation, improves ease of translation for localisation of content.
Questions we asked
Alpha ran from July to October, 2018. Beta was October to December 2018. We held live weekly, global discussions in Slack. We identified questions in Alpha and researched usability evidence to find answers to them in Beta.
- Do abbreviations/acronyms make sentences more or less difficult to read?
- Can we identify any abbreviations/acronyms that are universally recognised?
- Are all screen readers OK with the ampersand symbol?
- Do ampersands help or hinder readability of navigation, titles and names?
- Are there screen readers that read out each individual letter of a capped word?
- Can we gather a comprehensive as possible list of how screen readers read out dashes (and what they do with hyphens?)
- Can we comprehensively research screen readers with other punctuation that conveys meaning or adds nuance, like brackets?
- Can we formalise the low literacy primary evidence about positive and possessive contractions into a usability study?
- Do positive and possessive contractions cause issues for people with dyslexia, poor vision and learning difficulties?
- Does having a link mid-sentence impair readability?
- Defining style guidance on numbers, based on Alpha considerations. We will also explore some sub-topics.
- Can we identify some evidence for plain language being more user-friendly? (Very similar to legal language evidence study findings but it would be good to have something more general to point to for stakeholders.)
- Can we identify evidence for simple sentence construction being more user-friendly?
- Is there a tool to test a word against reading age 9/low literacy level vocabulary?
- Is it easier for users with a high level of knowledge of a subject (specialist audiences) to read content that includes specialist terms?
- Is there any evidence around increased engagement and uptake of services by less advantaged/minority groups when content written in positive inclusive language?
- Are there any user interviews about how likely people would be to uptake a service/buy a thing/recommend organisation, company or product based on the content language?
How it started
The Readability Guidelines Alpha explored:
- if an open community of content people want to contribute to a single style guide
- if we'd like to rely on evidence for the style guide elements – and if yes, what evidence would be most useful
- if a wiki model is sustainable
Read the first Readability Guidelines blog post.
We identified usability questions in Alpha and searched for evidence to answer them in Beta. Alpha ran from July to October, 2018. Beta was October to December 2018. Through the 24 weeks we held live weekly, global discussions in Slack.
Our Slack topic discussion channels are staying open. Explore: readabilityguidelines.slack.com, join: bit.ly/2D0OW1F
Contributing
You are welcome to edit, comment on or create wiki pages. Please include evidence to support your thinking.
This is a totally open project. As long as all participation is respectful and comments are given in the spirit of positive open learning – dive in! Any comments or queries outside of this wiki, please get in touch on twitter @ContentDesignLN.
Early days (I know) but keen bean, any news on location for the meetup? Going to book trains in advance.
Think we are going for 9th Oct, Waterloo, London. Is that near you?
Not sure where you want these but there is research on this aspect including a paper Miniukovich, A., De Angeli, A., Sulpizio, S., & Venuti, P. (2017, June). Design Guidelines for Web Readability. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 285-296). ACM.
[http://www.atw-lab.com/public/data/webReadability_3.0.2.pdf] Validated guidelines
- 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.
- Use a plain, evenly spaced sans serif font such as Arial and Comic Sans
Rello, L., Kanvinde, G., & Baeza-Yates, R. (2012, April). Layout guidelines for web text and a web service to improve accessibility for dyslexics. In Proceedings of the international cross-disciplinary conference on web accessibility (p. 36). ACM. Text on colour backgrounds made a difference but “the readability of colored background/text pairs is influenced by text size [8] and the font size used was big (20
points).” Several different choices were made but cream on black did appear to speed reading.
Freire, A. P., Petrie, H., & Power, C. D. (2011). Empirical results from an evaluation of the accessibility of websites by dyslexic users. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Accessible Design in the Digital World (pp. 41-53). York. As above and mentioned black text on white causing “ For these users (7 students), reading text on white background for a long time causes the text to start forming “visual patterns”, or “dancing around”.”
+1
Difficult to disagree with what's there! Happy with it.