Making user generated content accessible

Overview

Markdown is everywhere! How can you write markdown so that people with disabilities can easily consume and interact with your content? We'll cover some simple tips and tricks so you can create more inclusive content.

Example

Inaccessible markdown which we'll make better during the presentation.

What we did to make the markdown better

1. Created a better heading hierarchy so that users can quickly navigate between sections of content
2. Removed emojis within the headings because they were adding verbosity
3. Created better descriptions for our images so that screen reader users can understand the visual information on the page
4. Improved the names of our links so that users can understand where those links will go when they are activated and voice control users can quickly refer to unique link labels

Resources for creating better markdown

Articles

• GitHub Docs - Basic writing and formatting syntax
• Improving The Accessibility Of Your Markdown by Eric Bailey
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) - Writing for Web Accessibility

Tools within VS Code

• Markdown and Visual Studio Code
• Extension: Code Spell Checker
• Extension: markdownlint