By role · Content editors
The Part Content Editors Control Daily
A developer fixes the template once. You publish every day, and a single post can undo it.
You publish every day. Everything you post lands on top of work somebody did once, and it can take that work straight back.
A well-built site drifts back out of shape through ordinary publishing, and none of it looks like a mistake at the time. A heading picked because it was the right size. An image uploaded in a hurry. A "read more" link that says nothing at all once it is read out of a list with no sentence around it. A PDF printed rather than exported, which may arrive carrying no structure inside it. The build team fixed every one of those in the template, and any of them can come back one post at a time.
None of it needs technical knowledge. It is six habits, and most people have them by the end of the first week. What makes it matter more than it sounds is volume. A developer touches the template a handful of times a year. You touch the site today.
What you own
- Heading structure that follows the reading order, never picked by how large you want the words to look. Google has said out-of-order levels make no difference to Search. A screen reader user moving through a page by its headings cares about very little else.
- Alt text on every image you upload, saying what the picture is doing in the story rather than listing what is in the frame.
- Link text that says where the link goes, because a screen reader user pulling up a list of links hears each one with no sentence around it.
- Plain language, with any term explained the first time you use it.
- Real data tables with real header cells, rather than a layout built out of table cells or a table built out of tabs and spaces.
- Every document you publish, PDFs included. A PDF sitting at its own URL meets the standard's definition of a web page, so WCAG reaches it the same way it reaches the page that linked to it. What a particular law asks of that document is a separate question with its own scope and exceptions.
What is not yours
Contrast baked into the template, how controls answer a keyboard, and whether components announce themselves. If the main navigation cannot be used without a mouse, if search never announces its results, or if a form fails silently, those are build problems. Report them to whoever owns the build and carry on writing, because none of them can be fixed by changing your words.
Where to start, in order
- The content editor's checklist21 checks you run before publishing, all of them inside the CMS you are already sitting in.
- What alt text to writeFour yes-or-no questions that land on the right answer for any image you are about to upload.
- The website checklistThe sections on images, structure, links and tables are the ones with your name against them.
- PDF accessibilityEvery PDF you link is content you published, and the standard treats it as a page like any other.
- How to tag a PDFFix the Word file and export again, which is faster than repairing the PDF and gives a better result.
- Email accessibility checklistEvery check to run before you send, on the one channel where nothing can be fixed afterwards.
- Video, captions and transcriptsCaptions, transcripts and audio description are three separate requirements, and which you owe depends on what the media contains.
The mistakes we see most from this role
Not a criticism. These are the failures that recur across audits, and knowing them is most of avoiding them.
- Picking heading levels by how big the words look. An H3 after an H2 is normal when a subsection ends and the next one starts. The fault is not the sequence. It is choosing the level in a font menu instead of from the structure.
- Leaving alt text empty on a photo that carries information the words around it never state.
- Writing "Click here" or "Read more" and leaving it there. It can clear the AA rule when the markup genuinely ties the link to its sentence or list item. In a list of links pulled up on its own, it tells a reader nothing at all.
- Screenshotting text instead of typing it. The reader loses search, selection, and their own choice of size and colour. Good alt text does not rescue any of it, because the rule about images of text asks for the real text. Logotypes are excepted, and so is text the presentation of which is essential to what it is.
- Printing to PDF and assuming it came out tagged. Some print paths keep the structure and some strip it, so the habit worth building is exporting properly and then opening the result to check what survived.
- Building actual data out of tabs and spaces, or laying a page out in a table that then announces false rows and columns to a screen reader.
- Publishing auto-generated captions unread. The machine hears "broil on high for 4 to 5 minutes" and writes "broil on high for 45 minutes". It drops the word "not" too, and nobody notices until a customer does.
Tools you will use
Other roles
Find out what your site actually needs.
The free scan checks 10 pages in a real browser against all 90 supported automated rules, keeps its 27 best-practice checks separate from WCAG findings, and names the rule behind every finding.