Keep it clear
Online, what your audience sees on the screen will be the most visible part of your teaching so it is best to present yourself in the best possible light.
Given what I said in the ‘Keep it simple’ section, it might be tempting to throw everything you know at every page. Don’t.
Overcrowding the page with walls of text, however brilliantly you’ve written it, is intimidating to anyone that needs to read it but especially to the neurodiverse community and those needing to actively manage their mental health.
There is a lot of information available on the web about the use of white space and you should look into it more if it interests you but the upshot of it is don’t overcrowd the page. Think carefully about whether that piece of information is vital here or could be linked to or could be written in later or even dropped entirely.
Similarly, is that image/gif/video needed or is it just filling space? Especially if you aren’t sure who owns it. Being online is more akin to publishing a paper than being in your teaching space, many, many more eyes on it. Choose wisely. I’ll come back to images/gifs/videos in a later post, for now I’ll concentrate on the writing.
Chunk your sentences into smaller paragraphs to give your page shape, assuming you don’t ‘justify’ the text which no-one likes. In the ‘Keep it simple’ section I talked about chucking information and that will help in comprehension but the shape of you text is equally important for helping to actually read the information. Even when your brain is tired and your eyes are going fuzzy, you can see the shape of the paragraph which will help you focus back in to the correct section either immediately or after you’ve had a good nap.
This shaping also helps pacing. If this section was one huge paragraph, some of you may have taken a deep breath and dived in but more of you would have moved on to something else, possibly saying to yourself that you’d come back to it when you had more time or head space, never to return.
By using smaller paragraphs I have, hopefully, given the impression that the content is lighter and more manageable. If you run out of time you can more easily mark your stopping point and come back to it. Again, this will help everyone reading your content but for those actively managing their mental health it might be a vital component in them reading any of your content.
Paragraphs mean that your readers are able to read ‘just one paragraph’ and get started or motivate themselves to keep going by telling themselves ‘just one more paragraph’ and when those paragraphs are short and unassuming it is easier to keep going. At the other end, when your reader is done, wherever that stopping point is, being able to think ‘I’ve read X amount of paragraphs’ can create a sense of achievement. Again, this is important for everyone but can be really important for that actively managing their mental health.
Of course these same tricks can be used for yourself when you are writing the content.
On the topic of shaping how your writing looks on screen and making it easier to read, choose your font wisely and choose only one if at all possible. Just as paragraphs give shape to your text, fonts give shape to your words. This is particularly important for the neurodiverse community and specific fonts have been development to help those with dyslexia. You may want to consider using one of those but a key question to ask yourself when choosing a font is:
Which one would you want to read for an extended period of time?
The final thing here goes back to the beginning, keeping it clear. Links can be long or short but are always ugly and often made up of nonsensical letters, numbers, and symbols. They clutter the page and break the flow of information when reading but imaging listening to it. A screen reader will read every letter, number, and symbol and so by the time it gets to the end, it is likely that your audience has completely lost the point you were trying to make.
The way around this is to utilise hyperlinks, that is where the link is hidden behind text. To be most useful, these hyperlinks should describe where the link will take the reader.
Consider the following links, each linking to the same web page. Which one is visually more appealing? Which one gives the most information?
1 To be most useful, these hyperlinks should describe where the link will take the reader: https://webaim.org/techniques/hypertext/link_text
2 To be most useful, these hyperlinks should describe where the link will take the reader. More information can be found here.
3 To be most useful, these hyperlinks should describe where the link will take the reader. More information can be found on the WebAIM webpage describing links and hypertext.
Do be careful about linking to PDFs. Aside from potential accessibility issues laid out in ‘Keep it structured’, there is nothing wrong with linking to PDFs per se though they are more likely to change than regular web pages and are more likely to be available as a result of poor security than someone actually publishing it. That said there are legitimate needs for linking to PDFs so you need to signpost that that is where the link is going. This is because PDF links often open new apps, tabs, or pages which, if you can’t see it happening, can be really disorientating when you don’t expect it.
Hopefully what I have said here is clear but let’s have another list.
White space
- Throwing everything you know at a page will create a wall of text and turn your audience away
- Choose images and gifs carefully, not only for copyright reason but because they too can be overwhelming
- Be wary of not using anything sometime you do need that image/gif/video
Paragraphs
- Chunk information if they are kept short
- Give shape to your text making it easier to access
- Be wary of making paragraphs so short that they are meaningless
Fonts
- Should be chosen wisely
- Should be limited in number
- Give shape to your words making them easier to access
- Be wary of very stylised fonts or block fonts that use only uppercase letters
Links
- Do use descriptive hyperlinks rather than naked urls
- Be wary of links to PDFs
