Writing Content That is Easy to Read
Most of the time when we write content for our website or our marketing materials, we want to use words that can be very flowery or words that are at a higher reading level. Those things can be great to inspire people or motivate them to use our services, but by doing so we can be excluding a large population who may want to use our services but are lost by the language we are using.
The USA federal government holds web content at a higher standard than printed material in that we must follow standards known as WCAG. WCAG gives us rules that we must follow to ensure that our digital materials are able to be accessed by individuals with disabilities. When we talk about our content, we are talking about individuals who:
- Low Literacy
- Visual Impairments
- English is not their first language
- Cognitive Impairments
- Dyslexia
- On the Autism Spectrum
- Stressed
- Multi-tasking
- In a hurry
The WCAG standards require us to keep our content in a lower secondary education level or between a 7th and 9th grade reading level. By keeping our language simple and concise we can help everyone process our information faster and with less confusion.
