Good news: eco-design, attention economy, and accessibility all share common recommendations.

Writing clearly

Write short paragraphs and use bulleted lists instead of long blocks of text. Adapt the text for the web and make the content more accessible. Spell out all of the abbreviations and acronyms that you use in the content.

To meet the AAA accessibility requirements, content needs to be understandable by anyone with a literacy level of a child at the end of primary school. Present information in the most simple way possible so that even children of this age can find it easy to understand.

Make navigation easy

Use stylesheets to structure the information. Use titles, subtitles, quotes, and paragraphs. Navigation of a site can use any 2 of the 3 methods: navigation menu, site map, and search engine. Don’t forget to describe the content in the page metadata to improve the search results.

Present text in an accessible way

Information should remain visible and understandable even when stylesheets are disabled or when the text size is increased to 200%. Don’t put essential information in images.

Don’t justify text, because extra spacing between words can hinder reading for a person with dyslexia. Line spacing should be 1.5 or higher in paragraphs, and paragraph spacing should be at least 1.5 times the line spacing, in order to meet AA accessibility requirements.

Following these best practices is not a guarantee to make a website fully accessible, but it helps.

More info

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Come talk with us on https://slack.designersethiques.org, channel #projet_ecoconception (in French).

Authors of the guide: Aurélie Baton and Anne Faubry.