How accessible is your blog?
There's always lots being said and written about , particularly when it comes to the online presences of businesses, shops or other service providers. But what about blogs?
Since they're usually set up by individuals who just want to quickly and easily write about the details of their life, post photos of their cat or share interesting links they've found on the net - using the widely available tools such as , or , and their astonishing array of pre-built page designs so that they don't have to worry about complicated things like HTML and CSS - accessibility is often not especially high on the list of priorities. However, if you do want to try and make your blog more disability-friendly, then bookmark and keep an eye on . It's a blog (well, it would be, wouldn't it?) packed full of hints and tips, plus links to useful articles and tools.
If you've got a standard blog from one of the big services, have you made some particular changes to your template to make it more accessible to readers with a range of disabilities, and how easy was it to do? Let us know in the comments.
Comment number 1.
At 16th Feb 2009, hackerjack wrote:Please note: making the comments section ONLY bigger does not make this more accessible to anyone.
Please go back to standard relative sizing so that we as users can decide, much more effective.
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Comment number 2.
At 2nd Mar 2009, Elettaria wrote:I agree with hackerjack. There's nothing worse than trying to read a page with inconsistent font sizes, as you're bound to end up able to read some parts of the page but not others. The options on the main Ouch! website at /ouch/ are excellent, is there no chance of copying them through to these blog pages and also the Ouch! messageboard?
I've started blogging about disability and computer accessibility myself, which can be read at . Website design is a subject I'm certainly going to cover soon. I've adapted my own blog, which is with LiveJournal, mainly through use of colour, contrast and spacing. I assume that anyone who needs large print will have all websites set to a larger font size, and apart from making sure that my blog is still readable in various font sizes (I use a range myself depending on how close I am to the laptop), I've left it at standard sized font. I'm going to add links to useful software for resizing text and images to my user profile soon as well.
Font size isn't the only issue for those of us with visual problems: colour is important too, especially if you have dyslexia, visually-triggered migraine, Meares-Irlen Syndrome, ME/CFS, or an autism spectrum disorder. I use light green and light blue as they are the best backgrounds for me personally, and keep the contrast at a level which is helpful but not visually overwhelming, along with avoiding moving images or very long paragraphs. The density of text on the page matters to anyone who is having difficulty with focusing, for example with the eye problems caused by ME/CFS.
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Comment number 3.
At 4th Mar 2009, loabarb wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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