No need to employ visual cues in text aside from sub-headings
Accessibility
We do not need to provide visual cues in texts to break up a page (for example by using a string of underscores or dashes). Best practice is just to use sub-headings.
Reason
Sometimes, content creators will use a horizontal line to delineate one part of a page from another. Screen readers do not understand this as a cue to say “we’ve switched to another topic or point”. Therefore, when a horizontal line is used, it doesn’t have the effect the content creator intended. Visually, it can also cause a problem.
Best practice
The best practice with organizing the content on a page is to use a proper content hierarchy. You can take a moment to learn about content hierarchy and see an example of a well-constructed hierarchy. But in brief, it means to use sub-headings as a way to organize content in a way that is meaningful.
This means that content accessed visually makes sense. Look at this example:
My topic of interest
I am interested in accessibilty for a couple of reasons.
Accessibility is the right thing to do
Morally it is just plain good to help people.
Accessibility is a sound business decision
If your content is accessible to people with disabilities, it is automatically also beneficial to everyone. This means more people will come to your university.
In that example, the sub-headings are a visual cue, and an audible cue to those with a screen reader, telling us how the info is organized hierarchically.
Example of poor practice
Using a visual horizontal divider is an automatic visual cue and so when it is misplaced it gives us false signals as to the nature of the info. Look at this example again, this time with a horizontal line in place:
My topic of interest
I am interested in accessibilty for a couple of reasons.
Accessibility is the right thing to do
Morally it is just plain good to help people.
Accessibility is a sound business decision
If your content is accessible to people with disabilities, it is automatically also beneficial to everyone.
__________________________________________________
This means more people will come to your university.
Because of that horizontal line I now believe the last sentence is unrelated to to the segment above it. This is because people sometimes use horizontal lines in the way our English teaachers told us not to use commas: When you take a pause in writing, or when you are uncertan as to what to write next.
Additionally, that ___________________________ above was created using multiple instances of an underscore. When i screen reader encounters this it might say “Underscore underscore underscore underscore underscore underscore underscore etc.” (Tedious!) or it might just say it once (Confusing!)
Additional benefits
- Usability: This benefits visual users of a page as well as those with screen readers, as it encourages people to create properly organized pages….
- SEO: …and as we all know, Google and other search engines love properly organized pages
- Marketing: The more easily people can find your content and the more organized that content is, the better it is for business.
What WCAG says
(Be sure to learn more about errors and alerts.)
From WCAG: Punctuation “will affect how the stress and intonation (known as prosody) patterns from the text are heard, when converted into speech. For example, in English, commas and semicolons will result in a short pause in the speech, whereas a hyphen – [and underscores] will generally be ignored.”