Make Your Content Accessible
Accessibility ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can access and interact with your content. It supports compliance with legal requirements and improves the reading experience for everyone. Accessible design helps reach a wider audience by removing barriers that might otherwise prevent people from engaging with your content.
Making Pressbooks accessible is a shared responsibility between us, the software provider, and you, the author.
You can learn more about Pressbooks’ accessibility policy and commitments on our website.
As an author, you can take a number of steps to make your content more accessible and inclusive. We outline some of them below or point to relevant chapters in the User Guide, and we share some useful resources and tools to help you with your book’s accessibility.
7 Ways to Improve Your Book’s Accessibility
Headings
Use chapters, headings, and subheadings to organize your content. In Pressbooks, chapter titles are H1 headings. Use headings in order—H2 for new sections, H3 for subsections, and so on. Try not to skip levels (for example, don’t go from H2 to H4). Learn more about organizing content.
Images
Determine for each image you include whether it has a functional or purely decorative role. Add alternative text to functional images that clearly describe the content. You can use this decision tree to determine whether or not you should add alternative text to your image. Learn more about making images accessible.
Captions and Transcripts
Include captions and/or transcripts for any multimedia you include with your text. Learn more about making multimedia accessible.
Color contrast
Check the colour contrast for any images/figures included with your text and whenever using a shaded or colored background with text. In some cases, the Pressbooks interface will alert you to instances of low contrast (i.e. Textboxes). In other cases, you can use an online tool like the WebAIM Contrast Checker to determine whether your contrast is sufficient. Learn more about color contrast.
Link text
When using links to other web content, include descriptive link text for the link. The link text should describe the content of the link; “our guide chapter on Navigation” is better than “click here” or “read more” as link text. If you are linking to non-web content (file downloads, for example) or causing a link to open in a new tab or window, consider telling the user this in the link description. Learn more about descriptive link text.
Tables
Add row and column headers to give tables a properly defined structure. Screen readers read tables horizontally—cell by cell, row by row—and row and column headers help give context to the data in each cell. Learn how to add column and row headers.
H5P activities
Make sure to use only H5P activity types that are accessible.
Accessibility Checkers
Accessibility checkers are automated tools that scan your web pages for potential accessibility issues. You can learn more about them in our User Guide chapter on accessibility.
