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