Pretty Up Your Lists

This is another easy tip. When you're writing a short bulleted or numbered list, use your blogging tool to create the bullets or numbers instead of using asterisks, dashes, typing numbers in by hand, or just dropping down one line.

When a screen reader encounters a list that's correctly formatted, it tells your blog's visitor that a list is coming up and how many items are in it. That way, the person can get a sense of what's coming next the way a sighted person would from seeing the page. If your list is a list of links, proper list formatting will also prevent screen readers and text-only browsers from running them all together into a big mess.

In general, it's easier for anyone to read what you're writing if it has some structure, and that goes double for people with cognitive disabilities and some learning disabilities. Using bulleted or numbered lists helps people process the information you're sharing a little more easily.

Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox all have buttons you can click to easily apply list formatting to your list.

So make those lists, and make 'em pretty!

Sources and Further Reading

• Unordered lists: more than just bullets, a W3C QA Tip
• Using HTML Lists Properly by Mike Cherim at Beast-Blog.com
• Structure by Web Access Centre
• Using real lists (or faking them properly) at Dive Into Accessibility
• Cognitive Disabilities: Design Considerations at WebAIM
• Lists and Accessibility: How and Why?: Web Axe Episode 26
• Text, text, text!: Web Axe Episode 12