Text (Body Copy)
Website Accessibility
Spelling (and Grammar) Matters
We need to make sure that all of our content is correctly spelled, and not just for accessibility reasons. It's rather embarrassing to be using a unversity website where they misspell the word university (which happens all the time). As a user though, when you look at a word you tend to correct the spelling and fill in the missing letters. It's easy to understand the meaning of the word, correctly spelled or not (for example, did you catch that university was misspelled earlier in this paragraph?).
Misspelled words create additional problems with accessibility. Screen reader programs speak the words on the web page based on the rules of the English language. When a word is misspelled, those rules go out the window and while the screen reader will attempt to correctly speak the word, it may not be intelligible to the user. So in this case, what the user hears could be way off from the meaning of the word as intended.
Avoid All Caps
ON THE INTERNET AND IN PRINT, IT HAS BECOME THE TRADITION THAT WORDS IN ALL CAPS MEAN YOU ARE SHOUTING. AS A GENERAL RULE, WE WANT TO AVOID SHOUTING AT THE WEBSITE VIEWERS. ALL CAPS PROVIDES ADDITIONAL CHALLENGES FOR ACCESSIBILITY ISSUES AS WELL.
If you re-read the above paragraph, you might notice that it takes longer to read those words than it does to read a paragraph that is capitalized normally. This is because our eyes are used to using the shapes of the words as part of reading. With all caps, all the words have exactly the same shape to them. Nothing is above or below the line. People with reading and visual impairments will have much more trouble. Additionally, screen reader software will spell out words that are in all caps, rather than reading them.
If you absolutely require some text to be in all caps, there is a CSS solution that can provide all caps while still playing nice with screen readers. Contact a system administrator for help in setting this up.
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