School of Professional Studies Office of Distance Learning

This page is related to Accessibility

At a Glance

Lists improve readability by make text more easily scanned. The can also be used to organize ideas succinctly to make content easier to understand and retain. Whether the list items are numbered or marked with bullets, they must be properly formatted to be accessible to screen readers.

Formatting Lists

Lists should be formatted using the appropriate styles in Canvas and documents. To format text in a list, the Canvas Rich Text Editor, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and other text editing applications will have a “list button” similar to this: .

The following examples are properly formatted lists that look uniform and are accessible for all students:

Bulleted (Unordered) List

• Example One
• Example Two

Numbered (Ordered) List

1. Example One
2. Example Two

When a list is properly formatted, the bullet, number, or letter for each item is inserted automatically.

The following examples have the visual appearance of lists because the item markers have been input manually, but they are not correctly formatted for screen readers:

* Example One

* Example Two

1. Example One

2. Example Two

Conclusion

By using appropriate styles, screen readers and other text-to-speech software can identify lists and notify the listener, so they know that the next group of items are related. Canvas and word processing programs all provide options for formatting lists, so they can be organized by numbers, bullet points, Roman numerals, letters, or combinations of these markers.