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- Formatting - must comply with the layout, colours and formatting of key elements, for example, page margins, font, headings and bullet points.
- Text and style - must comply with Government Digital Service style guidelines
- Tables - we have adopted a standardised approach to tables to ensure they are as simple and clear as possible and correctly tagged for accessibility
- Visual elements - graphs, infographics and other visual elements must comply with accessibility best practice
1. How to use the template
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, or formatting your document
Going through the template in order:
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- Arial 12pt
- line spacing at least 16pts
- left margin 1.5cm, right margin 18cm
- all text is left justified, no indents for new paragraphs
no italics except for scientific names (E.coli) - do not use italics for quotations, footnotes or any other purpose. Italicised species names are allowed in document titles and headings.
avoid bold, although it can be used sparingly for emphasis - do not use bold to create headings, use the correct heading style.
Bullet points
Bullet points should:
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Bullet points which consist of multiple sentences or which lead into secondary bullet points are better styled as standalone text.
About UKHSA page
Here you can add information about who prepared the document and how to contact someone for further information. If not needed, this text box can be deleted.
The Crown copyright date must be set to the relevant year.
The publishing month should obviously be set to the correct month and year and the Gateway number is the number of the Jira ticket this job has been rasied on - but both these elements are generally completed by the Publishing team.
2. Text and GDS style
We are mandated to conform to Government Digital Service style guidelines of plain and accessible English. In practice this means we check all texts for:
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Avoid abbreviations. Spell out e.g. as ‘for example', i.e. as ‘that is', 'etc’ as ‘and so on’. Do not use ampersands. Spell out ‘&’ as ‘and’.
Capitals
Never capitalise whole words for emphasis. Capitalised words can be mistaken for acronyms, a sequence of capitalised words is difficult to read.
If emphasis is absolutely necessary, use bold (sparingly).
COVID-19
The first use of 'COVID-19' in every document should spell out the word 'coronavirus' before giving the acronym, thus: 'coronavirus (COVID-19)'.
COVID-19 must always be spelt in capitals.
Government Digital Service has a style guide devoted entirely to COVID-related content.
Dates
23 March not ‘23rd of March’.
Forward slashes must not be used in dates. So:
- '2/10/19' should be written out as '2 October 2019'
- year periods must not use forward slashes but use the word 'to': thus 2019/20 must be written out as '2019 to 2020'
Footnotes
Use superscript numbers1. The footnote text should be in 10 point font.
Headings
Headings must be in sentence case.
Remove unnecessary capital letters and ampersands.
Do not end headings with a colon.
Numbers
All numbers as digits, not spelled-out, so 3 not ‘three’, except for ‘one’, which stays ‘one’ unless part of a numbered set of steps or the context demands the digit.
It is best practice not to start a sentence with a number, so this sentence - '17.0% of adults turning 70 during quarter 3 were vaccinated by the end of March 2021' - should be turned into either:
'Of adults turning 70 during quarter 3, 17% were vaccinated by the end of March 2021'
or
'Seventeen per cent of adults turning 70...' etc
Use commas with numbers in thousands: 3,778 not 3778.
Use ‘to’ rather than a hyphen to indicate duration: ‘27 to 48’ not ‘27-48’.
Replace forward slashes with ‘to’. Thus 2019/20 or 2019/20 should be ‘2019 to 2020’.
References
We put all academic references in a numbered list at the end of the document, arranged by order of their first appearance in the main text.
These numbered indicators of end references are full size Roman numerals in curved brackets before the full stop (9). We hyperlink these numbers to the end references using Word's Bookmark functionality.
As to the formatting of the end references, we follow Government Digital Service requirements which state that references should be easy to understand by anyone, not just specialists.
Names and initials have no full stops.
Titles of publications have single speech marks round them.
All links must be embedded in relevant title or text.
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We are mandated, wherever possible, not to link to documents but to the landing page which hosts the document.
Speech marks
Single speech marks for the name of a publication.
Double speech marks for direct quotations (which are never in italics)
3. Table formatting
Use Arial 12pt where possible, although sometimes the size of tables requires smaller font size.
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Example 1. Line graph using dots and dashes instead of colour to convey information
(The forward slash in the year dates is sub-optimal style but permitted in graphs, not least because the graph should have a text equivalent in the main body copy.)
800px
Example 2. Bar chart using shades of one colour
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Note the way the key to the graph is not beneath it, but a) place inside the graph and b) aligned in the same visual logic as the bars, that is, left to right.
b) Flow charts
Flow charts need a detailed and literal text equivalent of every step of the process including all the questions and all the answers. A simple summary, or pointing to the data somewhere else, isn’t enough.
PHE's Fetal anomaly screening: care pathways page has several good examples of flow charts accompanied by text alternatives. Or see another example at the bottom of HMRC's Capital Gains Manual
c) Infographics
Infographics are highly inaccessible and so are deprecated. If they must be included a full written summary must be given.
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