In a previous article, my colleague Michelle Passaro wrote about accessible design, covering the visual, structural, and linguistic choices that make content navigable and readable for everyone. Her piece is practical, generous, and grounded in everyday work.
This article expands on some of those themes and adds a few more. Because before a document is designed, before fonts are chosen and heading styles applied, someone has to decide what to say, how to say it, and who they imagine is reading. That is where accessibility either takes root or quietly fails.
I work a lot with language, and one thing I have learned is that many accessibility barriers are not visual. They can be cognitive, linguistic, and cultural, and live in the assumptions we make about who our reader is, what they already know, and how much effort we expect them to invest in understanding our message.
Many think that accessible content is about making things simple, but it’s not. It is about making things clear, and the difference matters more than most people realize.
Clarity is not simplicity
There is a widespread assumption that accessible writing means dumbing things down. Shorter words and sentences, nothing too complex. This idea is well-intentioned, but it could also be misleading.
Clarity means that the reader does not have to do extra work to understand what you meant, while simplicity, on the other hand, often means you have removed complexity from the content itself. These are different operations, and confusing them has consequences.
When organizations try to make content “accessible” by stripping it of nuance, they may end up producing something patronizing. The reader gets the subtle message that we do not think they can handle the real version.
Accessible content respects the reader while taking responsibility for their experience. A complex idea can be communicated clearly, and a simple idea can be communicated badly. The difference may not be in the content, but in the care taken in writing it.
Who is your reader? The question nobody asks
Every piece of content is written with an imaginary reader in mind. The problem is that most of the time, that imaginary reader looks remarkably like the person who wrote it.
Corporate communications tend to assume a reader who is neurotypical, has no reading challenges, shares the cultural and professional references of the writer, has unlimited time and attention, and is reading in their first language. That is a very specific reader, and in most real-world contexts, it is a minority.
Accessible content begins with a different question, so instead of asking ourselves: “how do I want to say this?”, we can ask: “what does the reader need in order to understand this?”
This shift changes everything. It changes sentence length because you realize that a forty-word sentence with two subordinate clauses requires working memory that not everyone has in equal measure. It changes vocabulary, because you notice that jargon functions as a gate. And it changes structure, because you understand that a dyslexic person using a screen reader, an ADHDer, or someone reading in their second language, navigates content differently from the way you do when you proofread your own work.
Jargon is a power structure
Let me be direct about something that rarely gets said in accessibility guides: jargon does not just make content harder to read, it literally sorts people.
Every professional field develops its own language, and that language does two things at once: it provides precision for insiders, and it signals belonging. When content is saturated with insider language, it communicates expertise, but at the same time, it also communicates exclusion.
In the corporate world, the density of jargon is often inversely proportional to the clarity of the message. “We are leveraging synergies to optimize stakeholder engagement across verticals” is a sentence that, when translated into plain language, usually means very little. There is more complexity in the idea than in the performance.
Accessible content does not eliminate technical language, but it contextualizes it, explains terms when they first appear, and provides enough surrounding information for a reader who is unfamiliar with the terminology to follow the argument. Think of this not as a concession to less capable readers, but as a basic act of communicative competence.
Cognitive load is real, and it is not equal
One of the most important concepts for anyone creating content is cognitive load, which is the amount of mental effort required to process information.
Cognitive load is not fixed but varies from person to person, from moment to moment, and it is shaped by factors that content creators rarely consider. A neurodivergent reader may process information in patterns that differ from the ones a text assumes. An autistic person may find ambiguous instructions more taxing than a neurotypical, and a dyslexic reader expends measurable additional effort on every line of poorly structured text.
When content is written without attention to cognitive load, it does not simply become harder; it actually becomes exclusionary. The reader who cannot sustain the effort drops out because the content demanded more than it needed to, and not because they lack the ability to understand.
Reducing cognitive load is about eliminating unnecessary friction. Every vague pronoun reference, every paragraph that buries its point in the fourth sentence, every inconsistency in terminology forces the reader to do work that the writer should have done.
Structure is thinking made visible
Michelle’s article covers the technical side of structure, explaining heading styles, reading order, and logical hierarchy, and all of that matters enormously. What I want to add is the upstream dimension, which is seeing structure also as an intellectual practice, and not just a formatting one.
We may think that a well-structured document is the result of applying heading styles after writing, but it actually is the result of thinking clearly before writing. If you cannot outline your content in a way that a reader can follow, the problem is not in the formatting; it is in the thinking.
I say this without judgment as I don’t see unclear thinking as a personal failing, being that it is the natural state of first drafts. The point is that structure is not a cosmetic layer added to finished text; it is the architecture of an argument or a message, and it needs to be solid before the walls go up.
Practically, this means asking yourself a few questions before you start writing. For instance:
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- What is the single most important thing the reader should take away?
- What does the reader need to know first in order to understand what comes next?
- What can be removed without losing essential meaning?
These questions are not about accessibility in the narrow sense; they are about communication. Accessible content and well-communicated content are, in most cases, the same thing.
The myth of the average reader
Content accessibility is sometimes framed as designing for edge cases, making accommodations for users who are not “typical.” This framing is wrong.
There is no typical reader, as there is no average user. There are only people, each bringing a different combination of characteristics, experiences, and contexts to the act of reading. The dyslexic student, the employee whose first language is not English, the autistic colleague decoding an ambiguous email, are not edge cases; they are your audience.
When content works for a wide range of cognitive, linguistic, and situational profiles, it works better for everyone. Captions help people in noisy environments, plain language helps experts scan faster, and logical structure helps impatient readers as much as it helps screen readers.
Tone and register matter more than you think
Accessibility conversations tend to focus on structure and vocabulary, while tone is discussed less often, but it shapes the reader’s experience just as powerfully.
Institutional tone can be formal, distant, and impersonal, and it creates a specific kind of barrier. It signals authority, and it also signals that the text was not written for you: it was written for an institution to protect itself. Legal disclaimers, corporate announcements, policy documents, and onboarding materials often prioritize the organization’s comfort over the reader’s comprehension.
Accessible tone is human, not necessarily informal; it acknowledges that a person is reading, it uses “you” and “we” when appropriate, and avoids the passive voice, but because they hide who is responsible for what. “Mistakes were made” is a masterclass in using grammar to avoid accountability. But “We made a mistake” is accessible, and it’s honest.
Tone is also where some neurodivergent readers often encounter the most invisible barriers. Ambiguity, irony, implied meanings, and unstated expectations all increase cognitive work. This does not mean content should be humorless or robotic, it just means that when precision matters – like in instructions, policies, communications – it’s better to say what you mean. The reader should not have to guess.
What accessible content actually looks like
Accessible content reads like something that was written with attention and care.
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- It opens with the most important information, because the reader may not get to the end.
- It uses consistent terminology, because switching terms for the same concept forces the reader to wonder if you are talking about something different.
- It breaks long processes into steps, because steps are easier to follow.
- It uses examples because abstraction without concrete anchoring loses people.
- It says what it means without relying on the reader to fill in gaps.
- It does not announce itself as accessible and does not congratulate itself. It just works.
Which is, as Michelle rightly pointed out, the whole point.
A practical checklist for content creators
These are questions I ask myself before sharing any piece of content. Of course, they are not exhaustive, but they catch most of the issues I see in my work.
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- Is the main point clear within the first few sentences?
- Could someone unfamiliar with the topic follow the argument?
- Have I defined technical terms and acronyms the first time they appear?
- Are my sentences carrying one idea each, or am I stacking multiple ideas into long constructions?
- Is the structure of the document visible and logical?
- Have I been consistent in my terminology throughout?
- Have I said what I actually mean, or have I relied on implication?
- Is the tone appropriate for the reader, or for the institution?
If the answer to any of these is uncertain, the content is not ready.
The real standard
Content accessibility is a practice, a daily commitment to treating the act of communication as something that involves more parties, not just one.
The writer’s job is to make that idea available to someone else. If the reader cannot access the meaning, the communication has failed, regardless of how elegant or technically correct the writing may be.
This is, or should be, the baseline of professional communication. The fact that we need to frame it as “accessibility” says something about how low our standards have been for how we write to each other.
Accessible content is not a special category; it is content that does what content is supposed to do: it reaches people, it makes sense, and respects the reader enough to do the hard work of being clear.
That is not a niche concern; it is the whole point of writing.
Fabrizio Acanfora is a writer, communicator, and disability scholar focusing on neurodiversity, self-determination, and collective advocacy. He collaborates with Specialisterne Global and teaches on autism, neurodiversity, and diversity & inclusion in several university master’s programs in Spain and Italy
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