What if someone tried to access your content who was visually impaired? Or who had cognitive difficulties? Or who was hard of hearing? Would they be able to understand the information you’ve provided and improve their cyber resilience?

Our in-house copyediting team has created a series of articles to help you craft high-quality labs, aligned to the rigorous processes we follow. We embrace what we call the Four Cs to ensure all labs are:

• Consistent
• Conscious
• Conversational
• Concise

These articles delve into each of these principles, showing how to implement them in your labs to create content that resonates with readers, enhances learning, and boosts cyber resilience.

This post highlights how being conscious of your formatting can enhance accessibility for assistive technology users and how consistent formatting improves navigation for everyone.

Rich text formatting

Rich text formatting tools like subheadings, bullet points, lists, and tables in the Custom Lab Builder help organise information for easier scanning, better retention, and improved comprehension. Using these will ensure your content is consistent, accessible, and reader-friendly for everyone!

Rich text formatting elements carry specific meaning, which assistive technologies rely on to convey information to specific users.

Headings

Visually, headings represent hierarchy through different font styling and allow users to quickly scan content. Programmatically, they allow users who can’t see or perceive the visual styling to access the same structural ability to scan.

Heading elements should reflect the structure of the content. So your title should go in ‘Heading 1’ formatting, your next subheading will go in ‘Heading 2’ formatting, and so on.

To ensure your content reads correctly to screen reader users, don’t use HTML heading styling to represent emphasis, and don’t use bold to make text appear like a heading.

Lists (bullets/numbering)

Always use bullets or numbered lists using the provided formatting to convey a list. A screen reader will announce that the following information is a list.

Links

How a link is formed significantly impacts usability. Consider the following sentence:

“To find out more about this topic, complete our Intro to Code Injection lab here.”

Links are interactive elements, which means you can navigate to them using the tab key. A user who relies on screen magnification to consume content may choose to tab through content to see what's available.

The example above would be communicated as just “here”, which provides no context. They’d need to manually scroll back to understand the link’s purpose.

Always use descriptive link text that clearly indicates its destination. Avoid ambiguous phrases like “here”. If that’s not possible, ensure the surrounding text provides clear context.

“To find out more about this topic, complete our Intro to Code Injection lab.”

Bold

Only use bold for emphasis! Avoid italics, capital letters, or underlining (reserved for hyperlinks) to prevent confusion. 

Consistency in formatting reduces cognitive load, making your text more accessible. Bold stands out, provides better contrast, and helps readers quickly identify key information.

Avoid italics

With 15–20% of the population having dyslexia, italics are worth avoiding because research shows it’s harder for this user group to read italic text. Italics can sometimes bunch up into the next non-italic word, which can be difficult to comprehend or distracting to read.

Media

If you’re adding media to your labs, such as videos and images, it’s especially important to consider those who use assistive technologies. These users need to have the same chance of understanding the content as everyone else. They shouldn’t miss out on crucial learning.

What is alternative text?

Alt text describes the appearance and function of an image.

It’s the written copy that appears if the image fails to load, but also helps screen reading tools describe images to visually impaired people.

Imagine you’re reading aloud over the phone to someone who needs to understand the content.

Think about the purpose of the image. Does it inform users about something specific, or is it just decoration? This should help you decide what (if any) information or function the images have, and what to write as your alternative text.

Videos

Any videos you add to your lab should have a transcript or subtitles for those who can’t hear it.

Being consistent

Consistency is a major thinking point for accessibility. We recommend adhering to a style guide so all of your labs look and feel consistent.

We recommend thinking about the structure of your labs and keeping them consistent for easy navigation. In our labs, users expect an introduction, main content, and a concluding “In This Lab” section outlining the task. This helps users recognize certain elements of the product. It reduces distraction and allows easier navigation on the page.

For example, some users prefer diving into practical tasks and referring back to the content if they need it. By using the same structure across your lab collections, your users will know exactly where to find the instructions as soon as they start.

TL;DR

It’s crucial to focus on accessibility when writing your custom labs. Utilise the built-in rich text formatting options in the Custom Lab Builder (and stay consistent with how you use them!) to ensure your labs are easy to navigate for every single user.

By being conscious and consistent with your formatting, every user will engage with your content better, remember the topic, and be able to put it into practice more easily, improving their cybersecurity knowledge and driving their cyber resilience. No matter how they consume content.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next blog post in this series, which will look at inclusive language.

Share your thoughts!

There’s so much information out there on creating accessible content. This blog post just focused on the language, structure, and current formatting options available in the Custom Lab Builder. 

Have you tried to make your labs or upskilling more accessible, and how did this go down with your users?

Do you have any other suggestions for the community on how to write content with accessibility in mind? Share them in the comments below!