With the release of Accessible Bits (version 1.0), the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) addresses concerns that have been rising since the birth of the internet—and well before that in print and in the world. This document is not only a plea for electronic literature writers to work proactively in ensuring their creations are accessible to a wide range of potential readers—but also to explore the creative possibilities that writing in accessible manners opens. With the advent of social media, virtual reality, and ubiquitous digital culture, the need to be inclusive and to ensure everyone can experience a piece and grok its meaning becomes even more apparent. It is not enough to state that the art is there as an art piece on its own—we need to consider who can experience it and how.
Not everything is for everyone. But many in the electronic literature community have for decades stated that these works that depend on sound, images, navigation, or other electronic elements are like paintings or music—if you cannot experience the piece as it was intended, then the piece is not for you. We must ask ourselves why we are deliberately excluding so many voices. Although authors in electronic literature may not intentionally exclude disabled people from their academic and creative practice, the lack of knowledge, resources, and practice on accessible design suited to electronic literature can create barriers. This document aims to make authors aware of the accessibility issues in electronic literature and the varied experiences their choices might create based on their readers’ sensory, physical, and cognitive abilities. We include practical advice to guide authors in their decisions when creating new works.
This document does not aim to solve—or even address—every single accessibility issue that electronic literature may face. Rather, in addition to building awareness of the need to consider accessibility, we seek to build a framework to consider to make your electronic literature more accessible. We hope that Accessible Bits 1.0 will further the training and resources of electronic literature authors to create works that use accessibility both as a practical and artistic operation. The resources listed in ELO’s discord server provide further technical information for when you are ready to dive deeper.
While there are many guides for accessibility for your authoring softwares and in general, this guide focuses on creating more accessible electronic literature. As you use images, sound, navigation, games, and more in addition to text in so many creative ways, this guide can not give precise instructions on how to make your work convey its meaning to all audiences. Therefore, rather than prescribe a list of requirements to check off, this document asks you to reflect on your own work in relation to accessibility. We provide hints and ideas (for example, you can, you could). But being aware of these issues and possible solutions will allow you to reach a much broader range of readers and lower unintended barriers.
Although digital accessibility is multi-faceted and always evolving, you do not need to reinvent the wheel. In the Accessible Bits discord channels (ELO server) for this document, we collect tools to create more accessible works. These are by no means exhaustive but give you an entry point designed for electronic literature creations instead of having to delve into the entirety of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) or Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), which can be quite overwhelming for a beginner.
Some elements of digital accessibility overlap with the previous two documents in this series, Acid-Free Bits (Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin, 2004) and Born-Again Bits (Liu et al, 2005). Similar to their goals of “keeping electronic literature alive” and “bringing it back to life”, making electronic literature accessible also depends on a combination of technologies, including flexibility in the software/applications and hardware the work is made for. For accessibility, this often becomes a question of ensuring assistive technology can be used to read a work (see section 2, subsection Robust). As many of the design principles for designing sustainable electronic literature are the same as those needed for accessibility, it can be useful to read Acid-Free Bits and Born-Again Bits along with Accessible Bits.
For electronic literature to function within an inclusive community and contribute to culture, it is necessary that all participants—readers, authors, students, scholars—be able to access the works. The poetics of complexity in many works of electronic literature function as a critique of our everyday interactions with digital media, making electronic literature a synecdoche of larger digital culture. Especially with this in mind, it is important that this critical reflection does not present barriers for readers and authors.
he e-lit values for creativity, aesthetics, and exploration–accessibility is not only an accessory but an active assistant in your creation. Electronic literature focuses on creative experimentation and the subversive use of digital media. Electronic literature includes multimedial, animated, and navigational aspects essential to the works’ meaning, interrogating the medial experience in digital culture through critical play. This practice raises challenges concerning their accessibility.
In electronic literature, a sound, visual, virtual reality, or kinesthetic element might be incorporated as an essential element of the reading experience. But what happens, for example, if the reader can not access these elements? Here, it is important to think about how to make electronic literature perceivable for different senses without losing meaning. Users with disabilities need to perceive your content using different senses.
Operability refers to the interactions between the user and the content, with a variation of different (dis)abilities.Various types of interaction, or even lack thereof, can be key features of works of electronic literature. Electronic literature has been called ergodic, as it is an active experience of exploring rather than a passive watching or listening or reading. Sometimes you must be particularly fast to move on to new lexias; other times you must be very precise. Likewise, a reader may need sound or visual cues to navigate effectively. But what happens if the reader can not meet these expectations?
Many electronic literature works disrupt the smooth uncritical engagement that other digital platforms or media aim to create. They may be deliberately obscure, hide text or other elements from the reader until a certain movement is done or lexia is reached, create a cacophony of multiple voices, layer images on videos, etc. Astute readers may engage in this deliberate obfuscation and occlusion and derive meaning from this experience. However, there must be a distinction between intentional obfuscation and unintentional inaccessibility.
Creating works can be quite open-ended and complex; however, beginning to think along these lines can help you identify what elements may need to be considered so that your work reaches many audiences.To make a work understandable means considering your target audience to make sure you do not exclude the people you want to reach.
Throughout the years and decades, electronic literature has experimented with new technologies as they came on the market. As responsiveness and interoperability have become more prominent in technologies, the possibilities for accessibility also increase. The robustness of a work depends on its possibility to be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This principle not only overlaps with the other principles of accessibility, but also with the first two publications in the present series, Acid-Free Bits and Born-Again Bits. Making a work robust means making the work more durable and available through a variety of hardware and software technologies.
Electronic literature, by definition, uses elements in addition to the text (sound, navigation, images, movement, etc.) as an intrinsic part of the meaning and reading experience. These are essential to the very nature of your electronic work, and as you create, you are thinking about how each element adds layers of meaning.
You can create work that targets a range of audiences. You can have a surface layer of a story or meaning that people may spend a few minutes with and enjoy, with deeper meanings hidden below the surface for readers who want to spend more time and luxuriate in a richer and more deeply intertwingled and layered experience. Consider:
Think about how your audience will interact with your work (viewing the images, clicking through, hearing the sounds, experiencing the virtual reality, playing the game).
Electronic literature allows you to layer meanings, create contradictory voices and multiple threads, and develop an environment of potential connections and interpretations.
Electronic literature is not alone in addressing these issues. Many of our media already have accessibility features you can use, such as captions/text over video, alt text for images. Investigate these alternatives and incorporate them to provide alternative routes to your content.
As you realize your vision (or as you remediate existing works), consider these common elements that can make digital content more accessible and help your work follow the POUR principles. This overview of elements to consider is deliberately not a checklist, these are elements to consider to improve your work and to reach larger and more varied audiences. This section is structured by media types rather than by principle or disabilities to accommodate electronic literature authors who are new to accessibility. Simply choose the sections on media modalities that are present in your work and use the advice as a starting point to consider which improvements are possible in your work.
Most works of electronic literature contain text, and you can take steps to make your text more accessible. Computational text—text that can be processed as text by a machine—is, in principle, manipulable. The text you are reading now can be searched, copy-pasted; the appearance of the text (size, font, color) can be changed; and this text can be read out by screen reader software. This provides many opportunities for accessibility, if you use the techniques outlined below.
The key to more accessible text is to provide the reader with options to manipulate the perception of your text. A basic requirement to make this possible is to ensure your text is computational text, rather than an image, though note that this does not guarantee that screen-reading software and other tools can access it in its totality (see section “Navigation”). Images of text, such as a handwritten letter, are covered in the “Visual” section.
Ensure that you have a readable font and size for your application. An accessible font is characterized by unambiguous characters that do not mirror (for example, b and d or p and q may be reversed or g and q or 1 and l can look alike), and have sufficient space between characters (and lines if applicable). These fonts have a simple clear style, rather than being overly decorative. With any accessibility feature, there are naturally personal preferences that vary between readers. Additionally, your creative goal might be to have a text that is slightly difficult to read—yet you cannot control how difficult a font is to read for a varied set of readers. To accommodate these variations, you could make a feature for the readers to change the font to their liking or instruct them to pick a font that is difficult to read if that is part of the mechanic of your work. Also give your text a legible size, which, ideally, readers can resize themselves. Keep in mind that legible font sizes vary based on screen size and resolution—are you building an app, a desktop program, or perhaps a work that may be accessed on either? Similarly, avoid long line-lengths or give readers the option to resize the line-length without that action breaking the work.
Always use other textual and visual clues to convey the same meaning you are conveying with color for people who can not see the colors or are using grayscale (for example, rather than using just red for false and green for true, use a bold red or a italic green, or use different fonts, or provide a colored or differently shaped background). You can use text elements as well so that screen readers can indicate these differences (for example, put an asterisk or another symbol in front of one keyword like false or true). This way, you can provide more clues rather than relying on a simple red and green text difference that might be inaccessible.
Moreover, use contrast between colors to provide more legibility. Contrast is the difference between the brightness of two colors: the higher the difference, the easier it is to distinguish the characters. This is expressed as a ratio where 1:1 is no contrast (like white on white) and 21:1 is the highest contrast (black on white). Contrast is an important consideration for all visual elements, but especially critical for text, as readers need to distinguish the characters. A number of free online tools are available to test the ratios of your chosen colors. The option to change background and text-color helps readers determine what is easiest for them to read. For example, a darker background with cream-colored text tends to be most readable for readers with cognitive disabilities. You can create a default version as your vision of the art but also then give alternatives to give readers access to your work. You might even include a note on why you chose the original colors so that readers using alternative palettes can take this reasoning with them while reading the work.
Many works of electronic literature feature text that changes somehow during the reading process. Consider how you will account for these changes in order to make the experience more accessible. Could you “pause” the changing of text or otherwise cede control of speed to the reader? Could you format text in a static way as an alternative display for more controlled reading? Could you provide an alternative transcript or captioning system?
The content of your text is another part of text accessibility. If you want a broader audience, then clarity may be paramount. To reach a general audience and provide information that people with some cognitive disabilities can understand, for example, avoid jargon language or add definitions or alternatives for difficult words. You can also add too long/didn’t read (TL/DR) summaries for those who do not want to luxuriate in your volubility
The understandability of your text is also greatly improved by a clear and consistent layout of your work (more on this in section “Navigation”). Reading access can be provided by easing the reader into your work. We need to provide various levels of understanding and enjoyment. This can be done by giving the reader shorter texts with more rewards, especially in the beginning, to make it enticing to keep reading and playing. It is also possible to learn from game design principles by giving readers the option to learn the interface as they start reading.
Is occlusion and opaqueness an integral part of the work and does it contribute to the critical understanding of the work? You might decide which elements of opaqueness are key to the understanding of the work and how you can make other elements as seamless as possible. In some cases, you might decide that your work is only meant for people without certain learning disabilities, but make sure this is an active choice, not a passive assumption.
Many works of electronic literature use sound to convey meaning—whether it is a background sound or a key part of the narrative and navigation.
To make audio content perceivable to those who are deaf or hard of hearing, have audio sensitivities, or do not have access to the audio content for any other reason, it is important to provide accompanying text, generally called captions. Captions include a time-stamped transcription of both verbal content and other sound elements that have a function in the narrative that are shown inside the work. Give two lines of text at once rather than a word-for-word transcription as this will be easier to follow. Open captions are always visible, whereas closed captions can be turned on and off. Use closed captions where possible, as closed captions are manipulable text that readers can control to meet their needs.
With creative use of timestamps, you can create a similar effect of getting to know the narrative in a similar way as one would via the verbal audio. For example, you might have space in your two lines to give a whole spoken language, but the speaker may hesitate before saying the last word. Instead of simply giving the caption of the whole sentence, you can end on an ellipsis and only finish the sentence once the speaker utters it. This way you can convey the intended suspense of the work.
Consider how you represent non-verbal sounds. If you feel that it would not suit the literary value of the work to have descriptive captions of sounds, then you might want to replicate that meaning or experience in another way or at least describe its function; what a hearing reader would experience. Of course, a description cannot capture all of the nuances and effects that music can have, but having a caption that describes background music as “ominous”, “swelling”, “light-hearted”, etc provides more access to the work. It’s also a good opportunity to be creative, for example by extending the atmosphere of the work to the captions. A caption like “inquisitory music” might not provide a musical description, but it conveys a sense of whimsy in the use of sound and work.
As an alternative (or in addition) to textual transcription, you might want to add visual cues alongside audio cues for non-verbal audio elements. These cues could, for example, be little icons that represent the sound.
Remember to make these textual or visual layers accessible as well. For example, captions need to be in a readable size and font, and images need to have descriptions.This is especially useful if you use sound cues for navigation and interactive purposes. For more detail, see the sections on text and visuals in this document.
Visuals such as images and video are common elements in e-lit as well as digital culture in general. This section covers a wide range of visual adaptations: from not being able to view these elements at all to the importance of clear and responsible visuals for people who do see them (such as contrast, video speed, and strobing content).
Provide an alternative way to understand images and their meaning within your electronic literature work if the images can not be viewed—for example, if they have turned off visual content due to sensory sensitivities or if their internet connection is not strong enough to load images. Usually, you can use alternative text descriptions or explanations of the images (often called ‘alt text’) which screen readers can read out loud or which can be displayed in place of the image. This can be done using the <alt> attribute in HTML, but many other platforms have also integrated a function to add alt text (often in metadata). If no official alt tag is available, you can always add text to the work itself that will display near the image and function in a similar way—you may even consider including the phrase “alt text” in order to identify it as such.
These image descriptions must be equivalent and succinct. Focus on content and function, rather than endless description. In the case of electronic literature, try to put enough detail in the alt text so everyone can understand your meaning and results. The function of images is often literary or aesthetic, so think about how you want to convey this function through the style and content of the alternative text as well. It is tempting to use the alt text to convey even more meaning but try to avoid this unless you also very clearly also provide an explanation and add the meanings that you originally intended to convey within that image.
In some cases, the images contain text, which screen reader software would not read out, so the reader would not know the text is there. This means the text also needs to be in your image description. For example, if you have a hand-written note or a picture of a road sign or a gravestone epitaph, put the words and the order of the words into the alt text. If the image contains a short text, such as a header, transcribe the text into the alt text. If the text is very long, consider other alternatives, such as a separate text file that would be easier for readers to navigate.
Some images are purely decorative, in which case you should simply add an empty alt text field if you are using HTML. Not adding any alt text is ambiguous because it is unclear whether the image is decorative or if the lack of alt text is due to negligence. If the alt attribute is added but empty in value, the screen reader software will skip the image altogether, so only use this if the fact that there is an image is not referenced in the text.
For videos, you can create an audio description or provide a descriptive transcript in text, which may be even better for conveying the message. This can also help people who cannot recognize faces or follow characters. An entire transcript requires a great deal of thought and commitment, yet these transcripts are worthwhile if those with visual disabilities are part of your target audience. Moreover, just like alt text, it gives you another layer of reflection on your own medial forms.
Along with textual alternatives for those who will not see your visual content, you also need to have clear visuals for those who will see them. This can be done by paying attention to several factors.
Color contrasts are a main concern for accessibility. Contrasting colors are needed to distinguish elements in displays, particularly in spatial displays and maps. However, controlling contrast becomes more complex as soon as there is an image background. Images with limited opacities or transparencies (for example, an image laid on top of another image, or moving text laid on top of a video background such as writing on water) can make it more difficult to see content clearly.
Trial and error may be needed to determine effective and accessible contrast levels. Free online tools are available to test the ratios of your chosen colors. One tip is to print the display in black and white to see the contrasts, but also be careful with this if you are a young person without any visual disability, because people’s contrast perception typically gets reduced after age 40.
Consider how your work will be displayed on many types of screens. If you are using columns or horizontal navigation or other content where the display and size matters, experiment with how the work will be displayed on your readers' screens. It is important that the work is responsive, so that your text, images, etc. are accessible from a wide range of screen sizes: from cell phones to desktop screens. This will aid people who need to adjust the screen size as well (for example, need to magnify the page to be able to make sense of the content, or those need to make the work smaller, for example because their field of vision is very narrow). Are you publishing with a software platform or base that allows for zoom? As a rule of thumb, test if zooming in and out to 400% is possible without breaking the work. If you are using logos or images of text, try to use vector graphics rather than raster graphics as changing size does not affect the quality of vector graphics. Remember that users will adjust brightness and displays for their comfort. Test your work with varying brightness so that your work will function as readers adjust their display levels.
For video content, operability is also key. Adding customized timing options to slow down and pause content makes a work more disability-inclusive and helps readers for whom the work is not in their native language. Not being able to interact with the electronic literature work is sometimes a key feature of the work. This intentional reader frustration may be integral to the piece’s meaning and emotional connections. (We love escape rooms and mysteries within the ergodic reading; we may want to press the enter key many times before the door opens, etc.) However, some readers may already have difficulties that you do not intend or anticipate—making the frustration even stronger and not providing the reader experience you desired. A possible solution would be to add a description of your intentions. For example, in a fast-paced work, add a note that the operable elements such as slowing down are there for accessibility, but that the work is intentionally fast to get a sense of a character in a harried and hurried world. This way, readers can set the pace to something they consider fast, even if this pace is different between readers.
Finally, avoid doing harm with your images or video content. Strobing content can cause seizures in some people, so make sure your work does not flash more than three times per second. This is especially the case for red content, other bright colors, and big flashing surfaces. If you must incorporate these elements, have a prominent warning at the work’s title screen and explain why they are crucial to the piece and experience. Then allow readers to skip these elements as well. Some works, such as virtual or augmented reality pieces or games where movement is involved can make some readers ill.
Add content warnings for any visual requirements (and even content triggers such as violence) and the option to skip images and video, with a short summary of what the reader missed by skipping these parts of your work.
Navigation, linking, and the structure of a piece adds to your meaning. By carefully considering these elements, you can improve accessibility and also help your work live longer (or be able to be born again) as technologies change.
To make your work accessible, make the structure of your work clear and consistent. For software with clearly delineated heading levels, such as a web browser or in markdown, use heading levels consistently within the content of your work and do not skip levels. This makes it more readable and easier to navigate with assistive technologies. Where possible, test using free screen reader or other accessibility software—see how your work interacts with these tools. Are readers using these tools able to access the window or shell within which your program executes? Since using specific softwares like screen readers is a skill with a learning curve, invite software users to beta test the work if you do not have prior experience with the assistive technologies yourself.
Further, make sure that any code and/or markup is clear and consistent so that anyone can follow what you are doing. For the web, for example, use complete start and end tags, nest code elements according to their specifications, and avoid duplicate elements and IDs. Clear markup is essential for assistive technologies to be able to parse your work correctly. For other platforms, including custom apps, software, and social media, look into the best practices for making your structure accessible to assistive technologies for your authoring system.
Hiding or obfuscating things on purpose should be undertaken with consideration for your multiple audiences. If you plan to use occlusion and layering to hide text, for example, plan how you want readers to grapple with this obfuscation? Is occlusion and opaqueness an integral part of the work? Does it contribute to the critical understanding of the work? If some of your work is intentionally frustrating to readers, or you are making readers work for the meaning, be sure to indicate what is meant to be frustrating (for example in an introduction or metadata). Readers can then choose to be surprised through the work or can identify and address unintentional barriers. This way, you can delineate intentional ergodic elements from any unintentional barriers where readers cannot access your text in the way you intended. You may want to provide an alternative “cheat sheet” or guided reading experience for these readers.
Make sure your work can be navigated in various ways. For example, if you are working on the web and your work requires a mouse to navigate, enable keyboard controls as well. Consider how people may be using alternative moves to access your text. Every programming language or software will have accessibility controls and best practices and other resources designed for these specifics. Use these resources. For example, many people with motoric or visual disabilities use keyboard controls rather than a mouse or touch screen. Therefore, consider avoiding mouse-hover interactions that cannot be similar in keyboard use. Use standard practices in your authoring system for accessibility. For example, if you are making a work in HTML, add ARIA landmarks where HTML does not provide enough options for keyboard-focus navigation.
If your work is very busy with intentional interruptions or lots of links or navigational choices, let readers know that this is the intent of your work, but consider giving readers the option to remove movement and other distractions if it is preventing them from being able to read your work.
Metadata, or information about the work itself, is crucial not only to document and preserve electronic literature works against technological obsolescence but also to promote accessibility.
Metadata at its core is a way to communicate your work, both to human readers and to enable filtering through computational processes. Although descriptive metadata does not improve the accessibility of the work itself, having this information readily available makes it easier for readers to judge whether they will be able to read a work. Letting readers know what to expect (images, text, navigation, movement) ahead of reading is much better than having readers find out during the reading process that they are missing out on a lot—or worse, never know what they missed. This information can include what media modalities are used in the work, what senses one needs, or what accessibility features are provided. As an author, providing metadata about accessibility can also be a meaningful process to make you more aware of accessibility considerations in your work. You might want to add some accessibility features to your work or keep these in mind for your next work.
In addition to accessibility metadata, it can be very useful to provide metadata of the data type and necessary technologies to read your work. This can allow people who use assistive technologies to get a sense of whether the work is interoperable with the input and output devices they use.
In addition to descriptive metadata, structure and content metadata can be used inside and beyond the work to make it more accessible.
Structure metadata can be a schematic overview of a work of hypertext that allows readers to orient themselves in the work. This is especially useful for readers with cognitive or visual disabilities who would experience barriers due to the complexity of a hypertext. Providing a map in addition to the work would make that work more accessible without taking away anything from the occlusion from readers who do not need the map.
Some people may not be able to access your content due to technological or physical barriers. Therefore, they will rely on your metadata, your summary, to vicariously experience the work and extract your meaning. Content metadata includes, for example, transcriptions or audio description of a work. These documentations are usually time-intensive, but can also be a rewarding part of your work. A transcription represents audio in textual form, often focused on verbal audio with nonverbal additions only when it influences the work. This allows a reader to read your work when the original audio is not accessible to them. It also aids re-readers of your work to quickly find a section of your work, especially if you provide timestamps in the transcript. An audio description, on the other hand, is a description of all visual elements of a work, which people can usually opt in to play while experiencing your work. An audio description can also be combined with a transcription in a text document to provide a textual version of the work.
In each case, the work becomes more accessible to a wider range of people through structure and content metadata, and it aids researchers and archivists to preserve and analyze your work.
We have made this document specifically for electronic literature authors to get started with thinking about accessibility in relation to their own works without having to dig through all the technical standards at once. Of course, this short document cannot replace all other documentation for accessibility, nor can it anticipate every use case. There are many other more technical resources available to aid you when you dive deeper into accessibility.
We are making Accessible Bits as useful as possible, without making it too complex for beginners, in several ways:
As stated in the title and introduction of this document, we focus on accessibility from a disability-inclusive angle. We have not focused on other types of barriers in technology, requirements, and language that might not make work available and approachable in other parts of the world, for example. Fortunately, implementing accessibility standards will make work also more accessible for other barriers, this is often referred to as the ‘curb cut’ effect. A curb cut provides accessibility for wheelchair users, as well as for others, such as people with strollers. Similar effects play out in digital accessibility. Having good textual alternatives to images and video can, for example, make your work available to people without strong enough internet access to load the visuals. Textual alternatives for sound can make your work more available to people who need to make their limited laptop battery as long as possible. Thus, creating new works and revising older works to make them more physically accessible, with information about the work (metadata), alternative ways to reach the meaning (alt text, captions, scripts), etc. will also pave the way for overcoming other barriers (for example, making it easier to translate and to access with lower technology). We look forward to all of the amazing works you are creating and ways that you are lowering the barriers for disability access!