Wayne’s tips on writing for screen readers

Wayne Schiess has an interesting post on formatting your writing for screen readers. As Wayne points out, more and more people—including judges—are reading your writing on screen instead of on paper. So it makes sense to format your brief, memo, or whatever to make it screen friendly.

One thing Wayne suggests is to left-justify headings. I usually center my main headings (e.g. “Statement of the Case,” “Argument,” etc.) and left-justify my subheadings. But once, as an experiment, I tried left-justifying all headings—including the main ones. The resulting brief did not look bad. It certainly looked different. I went back to centering the main headings because I did not want the format of the brief to call attention to itself. But if we have reached the point where most readers are reading on screen instead of on paper, then it may be time to re-think the conventions originally developed for paper reading.