Best Practices and Standards (NEW VERSION)

• Use the 'Headings' format to indicate sections and sub-sections in your Rich Text box. This not only provides hierarchical organisation and formatting but also makes it easy for screen readers to scan and jump to different content areas.

• Higher numbered headings should be placed above lower numbered ones otherwise your hierarchy gets confused.

For example:

Use the 'Format' menu to choose your heading level. 

Heading 1 is the guide title, Heading 2 is the box title. Use the following headings to show hierarchy within your Rich Text box:

Heading 3

Heading 4 

Heading 5

Heading 6

• For tabbed boxes, include Headings in the content space as well; don't only label the tabs.

For example:

• Only use tables for tabular data that fits well into rows and columns.
• Don't use tables to format links or other information. 
• Use table headers to describe the contents of the table columns. This is important as otherwise screenreaders will not be able to give context to the content of the cells.
• Avoid spanned rows as screen readers may not properly parse them.

For example:

You can choose from several themed table types by clicking the table class dropdown:

The following table class choices have been themed to match the branding for our guides. Please choose one of these four that best suits your needs:

If your content is not suitable for a table (ie there are no horizontal and vertical headers; you are trying to display images side by side) you may wish to use a grid instead. Grids will organise your content, but do not cause the same problems with screenreaders that tables do.

Here is an example of a grid:

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If you think a grid will be the best fit for your content please speak to someone from the Information Literacy Support and Development team and we will assist you.