When thinking about creating documents for publication on the website, you should first:
- establish whether you need to publish the document on the site - often customers do not open documents, so you should always locate information they need to know directly on the webpage
- consider providing an option for customers to contact you to request the document if most people won't need it
General document requirements
When creating documents, we must adhere to the corporate brand. This means we use the corporate templates for letters and documents and use corporate fonts.
You should always keep the formatting of your document as simple as possible. This is to ensure that it is easy to read and understand for all users, especially those using assistive technologies.
Make sure that you use accessibility features in the software you use. See the support article about improving your documents with Microsoft's accessibility checker.
Contents pages
You must:
- only use contents pages where a document is 25 pages or more long
- format contents pages correctly, ensuring any links to headings within the document work as expected
Headings
When using headings to structure your document you must:
- use correct heading levels (using Heading 1 style, Heading 2 style and so on to establish main headings and sub-headings as appropriate)
- ensure that the heading level styles meet corporate and accessibility standards (taking into account font type and style, colour use and so on)
Text formatting
You must:
- not use italics
- left align your text, meaning aligning your text to the left of the page (not 'justify' which means distributing text evenly between the margins, or right alignment for use in, for example, page numbers in a footer)
- use colours appropriately, ensuring there is enough contrast between the background and your text - you can use tools to help such as Webaim's contrast checker
Links
All links must be:
- used sparingly - links break when content you refer to is moved or deleted so try not to use links in your documents
- contextual - you must embed the link within specific text that advises the user what it is, not generic text such as 'click here' or the full URL, ideally at the end of the sentence
- easily visible - the colour of the link must contrast with the normal text on the page and the background so it is clearly visible - there are tools to help, such as Webaim's link contrast checker
Tables
You must:
- only use tables where strictly necessary
- not use tables to format text
- ensure you label table headings and column and row headings clearly to show what the data in the cell means - it must make sense when headings are read out followed by the data in the cell
Images and graphics
You must ensure:
- graphics or images you use have appropriate explanatory 'alt text'
- graphics have appropriate colour contrast - use the assistance tools linked above to help you