Keep Calm and Check Accessibility Week 5: Bulleted Lists vs Numbered Lists

When a person who uses a screen reader approaches a list, the screen reader will announce that there is a list and will announce what kind of list it is- a bulleted or numbered list. For this reason, it’s important to use the in-built bulleted list and numbered list formatting options in Word to make lists. If you try to manually make lists by using hyphens for bullets or by writing your own numbers, the screen reader will not recognize the list and instead will read everything out like a paragraph, which can be confusing for a listener.

Bulleted Lists

Bulleted lists should be used when the order of the items is not important. For example, if you were listing items on a shopping list, these items would be listed using bullets.

Numbered Lists

Numbered lists are for when items must be in a specific order. For example, steps to follow on a recipe card would be listed using numbered list.

Read this article for how to make a bulleted or numbered list in Microsoft Word.

Go to the Keep Calm and Check Accessibility Moodle page and complete the Week 5 challenge to get this week’s clue.