A few weeks ago, one of my friends mentioned All Access Blogging on her blog and described it as a site with tips on making your blog more accessible to visually impaired readers. Ouch! Although I always try to point out the benefits of the accessibility tips here for people with motor and cognitive disabilities as well as visual disabilities, apparently I'm not doing my best at communicating my purpose here!
So today I thought I'd present a tip that's primarily helpful to people with motor disabilities. There are many people with various motor disabilities who navigate the web without using a mouse. No, it's true! You can get a lot done with a keyboard.
To make your blog more usable for these folks, you can make sure that your links have a "focus" state, which means a visual change when someone has selected the link. If you're a mouse user, you see what's called the hover state when you "mouse over" a link. Sometimes the link changes color, is highlighted, or some other change. For keyboard users, the focus state is the critical piece because it tells that person where they are on the page as they tab through - when the link is "selected," not hovered over with a mouse cursor. If you imagine counting the number of links on a page, and then trying to tab to link number 49, you can imagine how it might come in handy to have a visual reminder of how far you've gotten... unless you're the kind of person who would never lose track of where they were when doing such things, which I am definitely not!
As discussed in the tip about choosing your blog's link colors for accessibility, text color alone isn't really enough to ensure a positive experience for all of your blog's readers. Some readers have color blindness, visual impairments, or may have lost a little of their color sensitivity as they have gotten older. So I would encourage you to use something other than just a color change to indicate the focus state.
For more on this tip and how to implement it on your blog, head on over to Give Your Links a Focus State, a new section of How to Make Your Blog Accessible. And as always, let me know if you have any thoughts, comments, or suggestions.
Great post....and it does seem like in some circles, including the media, that accessibility is viewed strictly as a visually-impaired focus. I'm sure recent high-profile lawsuits have only enforced that.
But you certainly do cover all spectrums of disability...great blog all around!
Steve, thanks! The woman who made the comment about my blog uses a wheelchair, so I was even more like "what am I doing wrong?" I think you're right about the lawsuits, and people with visual impairments also have some very well organized advocacy groups who have done a good job raising the profile of those needs.