All articles in the ITS Knowledge Base will follow a consistent style and tone. This style guide is intended to provide a set of standards for content and formatting that should be applied to all articles. Please visit Creating Articles for descriptions of the types of articles that will be written in this knowledge base. This style guide pertains to all types of articles.
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When you are instructing the reader to perform an action, such as clicking or entering, you should bold the word that corresponds to the on-screen buttons/clickable elements.
EXAMPLE 1: Click Save My Information to continue to the next screen.
EXAMPLE 2: Enter a personal email address (not your @uconn.edu) in the "Secondary Email Address" field, and click Save Changes.
2.2 – Quotation Marks
When instructing a reader to look for text on their screen, use quotation marks around the words they should be looking for.
EXAMPLE 1: Quotation marks should not be used when looking for text within a button/clickable element (see "Bold Words" above).
EXAMPLE 2: Un-check the box next to "Show Labels for Each Page."
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Create headings by highlighting the text. Then, in the toolbar, click the dropdown menu that by default says "Paragraph." You can choose to add headings as you see fit, just ensure that the heading style is appropriate for level of your heading.
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All headings, regardless of which type of heading they are (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.) should follow standard capitalization practices for titles such that the major words in the title are capitalized. For example a heading should read "Helpful Functionalities of the Confluence Editing Window" instead of "Helpful functionalities of the confluence editing window." |
2.4 – Numbers and Bullets
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EXAMPLE: You can create an email alias (the portion of your email address to the left of @uconn.edu) that is different from the name originally assigned by the University.
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Macros are visuals that dynamically organize your content and allow you to draw attention to aspects of your content that you want to have stand out to your readers. They are especially useful when you have a piece of information that is important for your readers but that does not fit into the rest of your article. Additionally, macros provide additional functionality to your articles, enabling you to do things like link pages, condense your content into accordion folders, insert page anchors, create and insert project timelines, and much more. See Macros: Understanding and Inserting Dynamic Content
3.11 – Spacing
Confluence headings have built in spacing, but make sure you take out as much space between sections as possible. This helps the reader flow through the information more easily.
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Alternate text, or alt text is a textual description of an image. Alt text is applicable when inserting pictures into an article. It is text that describes what knowledge or functionality the reader is supposed to gain from the inserted image. Alt text is only helpful when it fully describes the form and function of the image and is not redundant.
Good alternative text provides the information conveyed in the image, including all text seen in the image and relevant details. It can be difficult to choose where to focus the description, so here are a few rules of thumb:
- If an image is meaningful, it must have alternate text. Not providing alternate text means that users who cannot see the image will miss information.
- Focus on form and function. Form or context often tells us what aspects of the image are most important. Similarly, function can tell us how to describe the image. A magnifying glass icon that serves as a search button should be described as a search button.
If stuck formulating alternate text, consider how to you might describe the image to someone over the phone.
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All inserted pictures in the knowledge base are required to have alt text. |
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You can search for macros (rectangle) or you can browse through the macros using the left-side list of macros (curly brace).
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3 – Tables
In order to make tables as accessible as possible, set the top row as a "Heading Row" and/or the first column as a "Heading Column".
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