Visual Accessibility

You can prevent difficulties here by not relying on colour contrast to highlight and differentiate between text and different sections. However, you can also test this by putting your content through a colour-blindness checker or a colour contrast checker. You will need to save your content as a file to upload it – for a website, you can save a screenshot as an image to do so.

The best standard fonts (available as part of the Windows package) for visual accessibility are Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, and Tahoma.

There are also some fonts which have been designed specifically for inclusivity, such as OpenDyslexic, Tiresias, and Lexend. In some cases, you may need to pay to install these fonts, but some applications already include them. For instance, we are using Lexend Deca for this website, which was included in the WordPress font options.

Many people, including people with impaired vision and motor difficulties, use screen readers to engage with online content. You can test if your content can be read by screen readers by running it through this free screen reader (or this paid one if possible. JAWS is a very popular screen reader, however it is costly

An accessibility checker is a tool that scans your content to identify any potential issues that could prevent people with disabilities from accessing or using the content effectively.

In addition to the aforementioned potential colour contrast issues, it will flag issues like missing alt text on images, or improper heading structures. It usually categorises these issues as errors, warnings and tips to guide users in fixing them.

Microsoft has an accessibility checker which you can use on Word documents, Outlook emails, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The accessibility checker can be found in the “Review” tab within the top ribbon of your Microsoft product.