Readability

The best user experience

Accessible language is about making the user experience as easy as possible.

The challenge we have is to make our content engaging and inspiring as well as accessible. Engaging and inspiring content also improves the user experience.

Our brand guidelines say we need our content to be impactful, snappy, full of energy and potential for the future. We need to be welcoming and approachable but we also need to express our expertise. It’s not always easy.

The crucial idea is that we need our users to understand what we’re saying the first time they read it.

Content for all

And our content should be engaging and inspiring (and being understood by) anyone from 15-year-old potential students to business owners and professors - and people whose first language isn’t English. The same content. For everyone.

So this means avoiding unnecessary complicated language. And, if complicated language is necessary (because sometimes it is), explain what it means.

Use simple sentence structure. Break up long sentences. Long sentences, sentences with lots of sub-clauses, especially at the start of a sentence, or sub-clauses within sub-clauses, and long words, specifically new and unusual words, are particularly difficult to read and understand for some people.

Useful tools

You can use platforms such as Hemingway Editor to help you improve the readability of your content. It assesses at the US school grade level – so a 15-year-old would be grade 9 or 10 (year 10 or 11 UK).

Silktide, our user-experience auditing platform, also looks at the readability of our pages and picks out hard-to-read sentences.

Our blog about using plain English goes into all this in much more detail. You could also attend a one-hour Writing for the Web session run by the digital team. Email digitalsupport@derby.ac.uk.

Additional information

Avoid using italics for emphasis. Bold may be appropriate if you are highlighting just a few words. 

Italics may be used for academic referencing of publications, but use sparingly otherwise.