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UBC LibGuides: Guidelines

Guidelines and best practices for the creation and management of guides at UBC Library

Writing guidelines overview

To facilitate a consistent user experience that leverages accessibility best practices and promotes LibGuides as a quality reliable source of information representing UBC Library, all guides should follow he guidelines on this page as closely as possible. The goal of this page is support librarians in communicating in a way that supports accessibility and an improved end-user experience of consistency; it is not intended to inform every word written for instructional purposes! Please focus on these guidelines to inform the page setup, titles, headings, etc as much as possible and use the best language for your instructional context/discipline as needed.

Accessibility best practices are duplicated on this page as they compliment the writing guidelines.

UBC writing guidelines

UBC Brand

The Editorial Style Guidelines for UBC Communicators are a helpful resource as they provide overarching guidance for web communication at UBC. They offer a consistent base for comment "decision points" in writing, and if we collectively follow them, our guide content will be easier for students to read. 

  • Use an ampersand & in titles and headings, not in text
  • Limit use of acronyms and spell them out in their first use
  • Use capitalization sparingly as lowercase improves digital readability and reduces eye strain
  • Use a colon rather than a dash to introduce a list, citation, or subtitle
  • UBC does not use the serial comma (aka, Oxford comma). See page 20 of the guidelines for those that love it
  • Use emphasis in text through font formatting sparingly; this includes quotation marks, italics, bold text, or different font types 
  • Write titles in sentence case, capitalizing the first letter of the first word, the first word of a subtitle, and all proper nouns

UBC Library

The UBC Library Communication & Marketing Guidelines pertain to specific formats of library communication, and may help you to find consistent language for library topics.

Accessibility best practices

Text and navigation

  1. Use a descriptive and informative title on each guide, while ensuring titles are distinct between guides (the Writing guidelines offer additional details on titles)
  2. Help information should placed in a consistent location on all guides (see Accounts & Contact info for more detail)
  3. Structure content using H3 and H4 headings to convey a hierarchy of information on the page
  4. Use the built-in list tool (bullets or numbers) rather than making your own list
  5. Align text to the left
  6. Use bold or italics for emphasis (rather than colour)
  7. Provide less information in meaningfully labelled sections
    • Use of H5 and H6 headings is discouraged as it means there is too much content on your page for best practices in web writing
  8. Show box level navigation for each page (
  9. Do not use colour to communicate meaning or design elements
  10. Do not use the built-in option to create a dropdown box in the navigation menu

Tables, graphics & links

  1. Use tables for data, not for layout and use a table header so that it has a contextual title
  2. Use alternative text for images unless a caption replaces the alt-text. View the W3C Alt-Text Decision Tree for more detail
  3. Include the file format and size in the file name. Example: Archives_worksheet_PDF_4_MB.pdf
  4. Only override links opening in the current window for acceptable reasons from the W3C standards
  5. Use a video embedding service (YouTube, Vimeo) that include free captioning or provide captioning and/or a descriptive transcript