Making government accessible
How we write and design to make government accessible to citizens
People will eventually need technical terminology
People will need to use the correct technical terms when interacting with bureaucracy that uses a technical term
rather than our special "non-technical" word which might be different from someone else's special non-techical term.
Don't try and act like the "jargon" doesn't exist. Hiding it is harmful
Find a way to make the jargon accessible
Provide more accessible terms that can catch someone's eye and for search engines to match non-expert searches
Provide the technical term early on in the user's journey along with an explanation so that they can learn the term
This is also important for technical users of your site, who would be looking for the technical term
Example
The technical term is "Section 32" or "Section 32 reporting"
The non-expert self-explanatory term is "In-year monitoring" or "In-year reporting"
This might not be beautiful design, but it makes a lot more sense than the important destination we want to help people discover:
Break up walls of text
We break content up into smaller sections
give them headings that represent the content of the section to catch the eye
We break the sections up into subsections that each carry some concept, even if they end up being one sentence.
Give them headings that represent the content of the subsection to catch the eye
Example
We often have researchers prepare a body of content that unpacks an issue in a google doc where it's easy to comment, suggest, review, and them mark approval of a specific version.
We then figure out how to arrange that content to be easily-consumed on the web, especially on a mobile phone using the above approach.
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