My BlogHer Thoughts On Accessibility

Let me tell you a story. It will wrap back around to BlogHer at the end.

Once upon a time, I started building websites. I used Netscape Navigator. I had no idea what I was doing. The only people who were building websites at that time were geeks. I got bored with it and quit.

Then I went to graduate school in public policy. I took a class focused on community technology centers. I was dating a guy who built websites, so he told me a few things. I picked up Macromedia Dreamweaver and learned how to use templates. I built a website for the class. We also organized a conference.

At that conference, I met Sharron Rush of Knowbility, John Slatin of the Accessibility Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, and Jim Allan of the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. After their presentation, they volunteered to open up my website source code and tell me what I could improve as far as accessibility and usability for people with disabilities. I expected a huge list of highly technical changes. What I got back was so easy:

• Dark text, light background.
• Use a style sheet for your fonts and colors.
• Add alt attributes to your image tags.
• When you create a link, use text that shows what the link is: "This story about the Volga" rather than "click here."
• Don't launch new windows or new document types (PDFs, etc) without warning your reader in the link text.

Do just this much, and you knock it out of the park.

I was lucky that I had only been building websites on an amateur basis for six months when I was told these things. I get the impression that people who have been building websites professionally for longer than that are not always open to these things. And now that using tables for layout has been deprecated, it's a little more of a challenge for old dogs to learn new tricks.

Since then, I have moved from building websites primarily with Dreamweaver to building them primarily with Movable Type. I've gotten lazy. I use dark text on light backgrounds, meaningful link text, and always use alt attributes on my images. But my design sense and skills are so poor in this medium that I'm relying primarily on style sheets made by others, which do not usually include relative sizing on text and other elements as is also recommended by usability folks. My current blogs use fixed-width layouts and fixed font sizes, and since I've always been a little fuzzy on why that's a problem when one is using a style sheet (or if I've just misunderstood the issue), I've just ignored it. I don't know if my current drop-down menus for archive navigation are accessible. I am a new dog who is lapsing into old tricks.

I've evangelized plenty of web designers on the topic of accessibility in the past few years, and I do get into the mix on certain issues that really punch buttons for me. For example, CAPTCHAs. Elisa Camahort talked about them, and I had to get involved. But when Koan Bremner blogged about a variety of accessibility topics, I let it go even though I could have contributed to the conversation. Crabby Old Lady laid out some great points about usability for readers who aren't 18 and have 20/20 vision, but I didn't link to it.

I think it's time to get back on the train.

As I was writing the post about comment spam linked above, I was actually thinking about BlogHer. Many of the bloggers there were non-technical. They don't have a clue in the world what I mean when I say "alt attribute." They don't have to. That's the beauty of it. They don't need a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver and a live-in consultant in order to make a website and share their thoughts, photos, and more with the rest of the world. I am now in the middle of the geekiness scale for people who make websites, because a whole group of people now has access to a technology that lets them make websites without being geeky. But they may need to learn a few more things so their thoughts and photos can be enjoyed by all their readers.

I've gotten lazy, and I need to re-teach myself, and I need to figure out how some of the generic rules apply to blogs (see for example in parenthese below). But if I do that, I'm in a good position to help my blogging peeps.

(For example, the rule about meaningful link text is meant to allow people using screen readers to pull up a menu that just has a list of the links included in the page. This can speed up navigation on a text-heavy page when they are looking for a particular link. This makes sense to me for a corporate or information site, where someone may be looking for the link "about" or "contact" or "weather" or what have you. I'm not sure it's necessary in blog posts, where readers aren't necessarily showing up just to extract information or find a particular destination. And sometimes the author may be hiding the destination as a surprise, in which case non-descriptive link text gives the same experience to sighted folks and those using screen readers.)

I'd like to revisit some of the classic guides, such as Dive Into Accessibility, make sure I'm up to standards, and figure out an easy and quick way to share that information with BlogHers and other bloggers. I'd also like to do the series that the American Foundation for the Blind should have done: evaluate the popular blog creation software and see how well it does out of the box.

'Cause if I lose all or part of my sight someday and I can't read my favorite blogs anymore, I'm gonna be mad!