I started this blog a year ago on Blogging Against Disablism Day. I had spoken at BlogHer 2006 about making your blog more accessible to people with disabilities, and I had been invited to speak again in 2007. I was trying to organize what I knew and what I was learning about web accessibility, but then translate it into language that would make sense to the army of non-geek bloggers out there.
Many bloggers are not web developers. Many bloggers are not web designers. Many bloggers are not technical. (That's the great thing about blogging - you don't have to be a computer geek to blog.)
And most importantly, many bloggers are using tools that already do things right.
Before asking people to make sure their blogs meet certain accessibility guidelines, I wanted to take into account what their blog tools already do. For example, sending a blogger to check and make sure their post titles are semantically marked up just seems silly. What blog tool these days doesn't do that for you? Maybe you're just trying to teach people about semantic markup, but I'd rather focus on the problem areas first and ask bloggers to fix those.
So I'm making another attempt to finish writing up a basic set of tips that bloggers can easily use to make their blogs more welcoming to people with disabilities (and those of us who can't read purple text on a black background even with our new contacts in.)
A blog is not the best format for a one-stop shop of this kind. Lucky for me, Movable Type 4.x now has Pages, so I am now organizing the tips into one guide called How To Make Your Blog Accessible. As I publish a new tip in the guide, I'll announce it on the blog. (I may also blog about a few other things in the intersection of blogging and accessibility, such as revisiting Ning.com's CAPTCHA issue to see if they've resolved it.)
Here are the updated versions of the previously published tips. I have tried to make them more compact and user-friendly than their previous incarnations.
- Choose Link Colors With Care
- Fight Comment Spam Without Locking Out Your Readers
- Break Your Posts Into Paragraphs
- Label Your Images
- Stop Mystery Meat Linkification
I'd be very glad to get any feedback or corrections, especially from the accessibility experts out there.
Hopefully, by BlogHer 08, I'll be able to point folks to a complete set of tips. What I found in the past two years is that when bloggers become aware of the issue, they make changes. They may not make all of the changes that I'd like them to, but they do care and they take steps to make their blogs more welcoming. Since the content creator ultimately determines whether a shiny new accessible website stays that way, I think that's very good news.
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