Submitted by pwadmin on
The central concept behind the technologies used to send web pages around is that the meaning of text on the page is much more important than how it looks. Some standardized ways to convey extra meaning are:
- Underlined text means that the text is a link,
- Italicised text means that the writer wants to put emphasis on it,
- Bolded text measns that the writer wants to put strong emphasis on it,
- Bullet lists mean that the order of the points don't matter; while numbered lists mean that the order of the points do matter (i.e.: a sequence),
- When you mark text as headings instead of just making them bold, it means that you have a whole section about those words.
When you're writing a web page, you should be careful to use things like bold, italics, underlines, headings and bullet/number lists only when you want to convey extra meaning — do not use them to make your words stand out.
If you really want to make certain things stand out, PeaceWorks can easily add extra styles to your website to achieve the effect you want.
Why is this important?
We want our web pages to reach all people, including:
- people with disabilities (who can't see the visual layout)
- people from other cultures (who may write things in different ways... for example, the symbols 「 and 」are used in place of quotation marks in certain East Asian cultures; likewise, diffierent cultures attach different meanings to colours),
- search engines or computers in general (which are not very good at figuring out meaning)
To help these people understand your text as well as you do, you must use emphasis, strong emphasis, etc. to give them extra clues about what you mean.
For example, a blind person will usually have their computer read emphasized (italicised or bolded) text at a different pitch and speed to convey the emphasis (it might even read quoted text in a different voice)!
Note that that changing the colour, font or size of text is not meaningful to these people becuase there's no universal way to explain what you meant by doing it.
Making text bold only because you want people to notice it will confuse these people.
Improving images and links
Images and links should also provide clues to explain their purpose. Images should use good alternative text and the text that you link should be descriptive. Imagine you were skipping between links to quickly scan what a webpage is about: "more…" or "click here" would tell you very little compared to "more about the Fall Celebration".