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

An example of trying to bridge between words people use and technical terms government uses

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:

Example of extremely important information that would probably not get noticed by non-experts

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.

Super helpful but hard to read content produced by researchers

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.

Same content broken up with headings and subheadings