The aim of the template is to ensure consistency of style and formatting across all PDFs which UKHSA publishes.

Download the UKHSA template by clicking on this image.

UKHSA Publishing checks that all documents comply with guidelines and requirements in the following areas:

1. Formatting - must comply with the layout, colours and formatting of key elements, for example, page margins, font, headings and bullet points.
2. Text and style - must comply with Government Digital Service style guidelines
3. Tables - we have adopted a standardised approach to tables to ensure they are as simple and clear as possible and correctly tagged for accessibility
4. Visual elements - graphs, infographics and other visual elements must comply with accessibility best practice

1. How to use the template, or formatting your document

Style menu

The template allows you to apply all the common styles to your text, such as body copy, headings, bullet points and so on, which is shown in the list of styles on the second page.

Do NOT try to access these styles from the Styles panel in the ribbon:

Instead use the formatted UKHSA Style menu. 

Under the Styles and to the right is a is a small arrow.

Click this to open the Styles menu.

Note that the first time you do this the Style menu might open over your document. Click next to the word Style and drag it over to the left side of your screen, and hover it so it's just under the ribbon. Sooner or later it should 'click' into place and will from now on always open in this position.

You can make it wider or narrower, according to need or taste.

This Style menu contains all the styles you should need for an UKHSA document.

To use it, highlight the text you want to apply a style to, then select the appropriate styling from this list, for example 'Body copy' or 'Chapter heading'.

Tip: Sometimes text gets corrupted or fails to respond to styling. In this case, highlight it and go to Clear All at the top of the Style menu to remove all formatting and start again.

Title page

Use the main, secondary and subtitle styles as necessary.

Information about collaborators and co-authors should not go on the title page but in an Acknowledgment section or 'Prepared by' box on the About UKHSA page at the end.

Table of contents (ToC)

When the document is finished, click the line below to activate the table of contents.

Manually highlight and delete the Title and Contents entries.

If you need to edit  the ToC, right click the table, select ‘Update field’ then ‘Update page numbers only’, unless you need to completely rebuild it, in which case select ‘Update entire table’.

Running header

Double click where it says 'Main title goes here as running header' to open the document header. Insert the title of the document in 10pt Arial in dark grey, not black. Ideally the running header should go on one line so it can be a sub-edited or abbreviated version of the title.

Headings

Headings must indicate the hierarchy of importance. Major new sections are Chapter headings, underneath which sit headings 2, 3 and 4.

Bold should not be used to indicate headings, only to emphasise important words.

Page margins

Left margin 1.8cm, right margin 1.8cm, top margin 3cm, bottom margin 2cm.

When you change a page to landscape orientation, Word changes the left margin to 2cm and the top margin to 1.8cm. This pushes a chart or table title uncomfortably close to the running header.

You have to manually fix these back to top 3cm and left 1.8cm by going to Layout > Margins > Custom margins and adjusting the numbers in the Margins section.

Body copy

All text should be styled as 'Body copy'. This means:

• Arial 12pt
• line spacing set to 'At least 16pts'
• 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:

• have a lead-in line ending in a colon, followed by a line space
• no initial capital (unless a Proper Noun)
• no end punctuation
• be used for short clauses, not sentences or paragraphs

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:

Acronyms

Spell acronyms out them out on their first appearance.

Abbreviations

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, so:

Names and initials of authors have no full stops.

Titles of publications have single speech marks round them.

All links must be embedded in the relevant title or text i.e. no exposed URLs.

Use plain English, so ‘and others’ instead of ‘et al’.

Spell out journal names in full. Google them, if necessary.

No full stop at the end of reference.

Spell out the volume number, issue number and pages.

1. Lopez Bernal J, Andrews N, Gower C, Robertson C, Stowe J, Tessier E and others. ‘Effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines on covid-19 related symptoms, hospital admissions, and mortality in older adults in England: test negative case-control study’. British Medical Journal 2021: volume 373, page 1088
2. Public Health England. ‘Public Health England vaccine effectiveness report – March 2021: Public Health England; 2021’
3. Pritchard E, Matthews PC, Stoesser N, Eyre DW, Gethings O, Vihta K-D and others. ‘Impact of vaccination on SARS-CoV-2 cases in the community: a population-based study using the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey’. Infectious Diseases 2020: volume 27, issue 5, pages 234-244

Links

Do not leave URLs exposed. All links must be embedded in the relevant meaningful text.

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.

Abbreviations, not acceptable in normal text, are acceptable in tables if there is limited space.

Avoid merged cells, this makes tables inaccessible.

Make all margins / borders visible.

Format the table in Layout > Table properties > Table tab. Make the left and right cell margins 0.15cm.

Note: make sure the Top field is set to 0 cm. Having any value in this field is a prime cause for lines in a table disappearing when you convert it to PDF.

To space the text and let it breathe, go to the Home tab, click the small arrow in the Paragraph group to open the Paragraph dialogue box. Set the spacing before and after to 2pt. This is enough to separate the text from cell borders and so make the table easier to read.

Header row:

1. Use light grey to indicate header row - highlight the header row, go to Table Design > Shading and choose the lightest grey at the top left which is called 'White, Background 1, Darker 5%'.
2. Header row text in bold

The header row of each table must be tagged for accessibility. Do this by highlighting the header row, going to the Table Layout tab  and click the Repeat header rows button. The ostensible point of this is to make header rows appear over multiple pages, but it also has the effect of tagging the header row for accessibility and so should be done even if the table is on one page.

As a general rule, text in a table should be aligned top left of cells and data top right.

Align content in a table use the Alignment buttons under the Layout tab i.e. highlight a column and select top left or top right. DO NOT USE THE SPACE BAR TO POSITION CONTENT IN TABLES - use the align functionality.

Numbers must include the thousand comma, that is: 11,328 not 11328.

Avoid colour in graphs. This:

1. is conveying information through colour, which unsighted people cannot see - find another way to highlight cells - the obvious route is to add a letter in square brackets; for example the common use of red, amber and green to highlight cells can be used but only so long as you add [R], [A] and [G] to the respective cells, and explain what they mean above the table.
2. risks breaching colour contrast requirements, namely that the contrast ratio between a foreground colour and a background colour are above a certain ratio

3. Visual elements

a) Accessible graphs

Rule 1. The key information contained in visual elements – graphs, graphics, infographics and flow charts – must be summarised in the text. Imagine you are blind. You only know what a screen reader reads out to you. Everything important about a graph must be summarised in the main body copy.

Rule 2. If using a visual element, do not rely on colour to convey information. The important visual information must be understandable in black and white before you add colour. Paste graphs into the Colblindor website then select Monochromacy radio button to check you can clearly distinguish all the elements and understand the information in black and white.

1. Instead of colour, line graphs can use markers or dots and dashes to distinguish lines.
2. Bar charts are best using shades of one colour. Shades of blue are optimal.

Rule 3. If using coloured text or text on a coloured background, it must comply with WCAG colour contrast requirements.

Graphs must be big enough to read the text and legends. Often this requires putting them on landscape pages. (Tip: creating landscape pages often knocks the page numbers out. If your new landscape page number is 2, highlight it, right click it, select ‘Format page numbers’ and then ‘Continue from previous section’ to restore its place in the sequence of page numbers.)

Text is ideally Arial 12pt as in main body copy.

Graphs do not have a frame round them.

Use the style menu to apply the Figures/charts title style to the title. Visually, this just makes it go bold, but it is important to use the style and not bold because this tags the title correctly when the doc is converted to PDF.

Table and figure titles have no full stop at the end.

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.)

Example 2. Bar chart using shades of one colour

Bar charts are best using shades of one colour. Shades of blue are optimal.

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.

UKHSA'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.