Design
To Try: Easy Scanning
Content should be arranged in a manner so it has a logical flow. Using an organizing scheme, headings, and subheadings and lists to organize content allows students to clearly see how the main concepts are related.
An explicit organising scheme allows students to find what they are looking for. Wurman (1989) suggests that there are five organisational schemes around which information can be arranged. He called these schemes the five hat racks. They are category (similarity relatedness), time (chronological sequence), location (geography or spatial references), writing system (alphabet) and continuum (magnitude, highest to lowest, best to worst).
Headings are visual references to indicate the hierarchy and structure of a document. They help the reader to identify the hierarchical structure of a document (e.g., sections, sub-sections). Headings provide a visual cue that lead sighted readers to quickly navigate through sections of a document, skimming through content until they find a section they are looking for.
When creating headings, many change the font, enlarge the size and select bold type, thus creating the impression of a heading. Rather than using visual cues for headings, make use of the underlying code or stylesheets within a program so that screen reader users can also benefit from the headings.
In a Microsoft Word document, use the style sheet to create your headings. In your LMS, also use the formatting styles available to create headings and subheadings. If you know how to use HTML, use the tags that denote the headings: ranked h1 through h6.
This approach prevents screen readers from just “reading” through the text of a heading as if it were part of another paragraph of content and missing intended cues about structure and organisation.
When correct conventions are used, then screen reader users can navigate a page according to its headings. The “reader” can listen to a list of all headings, and skip to a desired heading and begin reading from that point.
Lists come in two forms i.e. ordered (1, 2, 3…) and unordered lists (bulleted).
These lists make it easy to show hierarchies of information in a similar way to using heading levels. It is important that lists are created using structure provided by the word processor or content editor you use, and that logical nesting is used. It’s good practice not to use asterisks, custom symbols, or tabs to create lists.
See Open Library Publishing Platform for more