Freelance content designer and founder of Clear Language Club.
81 postsLots of wonderful stuff to get your teeth into in The Inclusive Design Guide:
The Inclusive Design Guide can be applied to digital design as well as to the design of services, the built environment and physical products. It can be applied to processes like workshops, meetings, conferences, and even our daily interactions with one another. It can be used by anyone.
By the way, I found this via an excellent collection of accessible design resources put together by Chris Nasrawi.
Do you do a lot of copy and pasting? Have you ever used a clipboard manager before? Well, I am here to tell you that your life is about to be changed. Pastebot is my app of choice and I use it constantly.
It does a few things, but the most important is it remembers more than one thing you copied, including images and any formatting if you want it.
Here is the blurb:
If copy and paste is a part of your workflow, Pastebot is an indispensable tool to improve your productivity. Quickly recall clippings that you have copied before and apply powerful text filters to format before pasting. Queue up multiple clippings to paste in sequence. Pastebot is always running and only a keyboard shortcut away to command copy & paste.
And if you do not use a Mac, Zapier has a list of what it reckons to be the 5 best clipboard managers, which covers various platforms.
Many local council's in the UK will now include a web page that explains their policy on clear language. This example from South Tyneside is deliciously concise and provides a near-perfect introduction to the world of plain English.
Adding alt text to an image is a way of describing its content and meaning in an alternative format. Enjoy these examples from Holly Tuke, who has gathered a collection of organisations and individuals doing alt text well on social media.
Here's a good introduction to alt text on GOV.UK.
This post on sentence length was published on GOV.UK in 2014, but the benefits of writing shorter sentences remain the same today. One other thing that I always emphasise when running training sessions is one idea per sentence. It forces you to think about what you are trying to say and helps get the word count down.
Raymond Carver