Guides best practices: Accessibility best practices
After using this guide, Stanford Libraries staff will be able to build, assess, and maintain research guides that address specific information needs.
Accessibility best practices
Avoid the most common LibGuide accessibility pitfalls using these tips.
Headings
- First heading size for rich text/HTML is Heading 3 (Top level of the guide uses H1 and H2)
- Don’t skip heading levels (don’t go from H4 to H6)
- Be careful about spacing in your text, don’t use heading format to create spacing
- Don’t use headings for style, just page navigation. You can change the style of the text using the rich text/HTML features, but text should be at least 16px (default text size for normal text on a LibGuide)
- Check the Source to make sure you don’t have empty heading tags
- Make sure to always have some text content under a heading
Links
- Don’t use images for links, preferable to create text link
- Each link should have informative Display Text, do not use the URL for the Display Text
- If you add links in your rich text/HTML, make them bold so they stand out more (our style sheet doesn’t underline them so they can be hard to see)
- Links in rich text/HTML are not checked by the link checker so please periodically review
Tables
- Tables are only for tabular data, do not use a table for formatting
- Make sure to use appropriate headers in a table (choose headers from dropdown)
Embedded Media
- For iframes embedded in rich text/HTML, make sure to add a meaningful title in the iframe HTML
Images
- Add alt text if the image is informative (max ~125 characters ideally)
- If the image is decorative, don’t add alt text
- If the image has too much information for alt text, you need to add the information somewhere else
- Don’t need to add alt text to a book cover image if the image is next to the book information in the text
Repurposing Content
- To copy content into a box from another program, make sure to paste into a text editor first to remove formatting
- Last Updated: Nov 21, 2024 9:09 AM
- URL: https://guides.library.stanford.edu/bestpractices
- Print Page