This is an unpublished draft preview that might include content that is not yet approved. The published website is at w3.org/WAI/.

Use symbols that help the user

Description

Add familiar images, symbols and pictographs to aid understanding.

User Story

As someone who finds reading and language difficult I see symbols that help me find sections and understand content.

What To Do

Provide relevant symbols alongside text paragraphs or words to help with understanding. Symbols alongside paragraphs should summarize the topic and support understanding of the text. Symbols next to words can help clarify meaning of more difficult words.

Use carefully chosen symbols to identify sections and regions of text content. For example use a clear and appropriate symbol for the “Contact Us” or “Help” section of a site.

How It Helps

Careful use of symbols can make it easy to find sections or links. Symbols can also make content easier to understand.

People who have language comprehension difficulties and may be able to mechanically read but not readily understand the content or those who have learning and/or reading difficulties may rely on symbols to understand and navigate content.

For example, a person with aphasia, has the intellectual ability to understand concepts, but struggles with language skills. They may be dependent on the use of symbols to understand content and browse pages for information.

Additional symbols can also help the elderly who can find cluttered pages with dense text hard to process. Clear symbols and images that act as signposts to the text content can be very helpful.

More details

????Sometime symbols are highly personal to the individual user so personalization semantics and AT will be come useful as they mature??????;

Examples

Sufficient

A set of instructions where the bullet points are symbols relating to the content within the text.

Insufficient

A page with important instructions and no symbols or images to guide the reader or a very cluttered page of symbols that confuses.

Key Terms

? Coga is developing a list of terms so should we repeat here or simple link to it ?

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This is an unpublished draft preview that might include content that is not yet approved. The published website is at w3.org/WAI/.