The Accessibility Minute-ish Episode 3

Welcome to The Accessibility Minute. I am your host, Alex Sanchez, and today we are building better documents.

Admit it. You are staring at a blank word document. You type the number one, hit the spacebar.

And when word tries to be helpful by automatically indenting it into a list, you instantly hit Ctrl Plus Z to undo it out of pure, unadulterated rage because it messed up your margins.

Then you manually type number two, number three, and so on.

It's a completely understandable reflex, but congratulations, you just manually typed out a w c a g failure when you let the software do its job and use proper list formatting like the neat list of apples, bananas, and oranges appearing on screen right now, a screen reader happily announces list with three items.

The user knows exactly what's coming and can navigate through it easily.

But if you just type the numbers manually to spite the auto formatter, watch as our neat list suddenly slams together into one massive, jumbled block of text.

That is exactly how a screen reader interprets it as one breathless, chaotic paragraph.

The numbers lose all their structural meaning. The fix is incredibly simple. Lists are for lists. 

Back in a word document, I will manually delete those fake typed numbers.

Highlight all three lines of text and go up to the home ribbon to click the native numbered list icon.

See how the text snaps into a proper formatted list. This ensures the structural math checks out behind the scenes.

If that auto-indent still makes your left eye twitch, don't break the list.

Look up at the top horizontal ruler in your document. You can just click the bottom hanging indent marker that little triangle,

and slowly drag it to the left to adjust your spacing without breaking the list formatting. 

Use the right tool for the job and let go of the Control Plus Z key.

That is your accessibility minute. Remember to inclusion starts with proper structure. See you next week!