July 2009 Archives

On Wednesday I am off to the BlogHer conference in Chicago, and once again I am honored to be presenting on accessibility and blogging. I get the feeling that most of the people reading this blog are accessibility geeks, so I ask you, what are the key items I should be sharing with my fellow bloggers?

My session is flagged as appropriate for beginners, which is going to include some people who don't even know what HTML means, but I assume I'll also have some folks with some code knowledge wander in.

So far I've tried to take the best of the two previous presentations I've done, and the areas I'm focusing on are as follows - going for a mix of what's really important and other things that are helpful and easily doable:

• Breaking posts into paragraphs
• Real list markup
• Meaningful link text
• Not breaking the back button
• Alt attribute for images
• Sufficient contrast between text and background
• Using something other than color to designate links
• CAPTCHA avoidance
• Page title
• Music that plays automatically

What else is a burning issue that must be addressed?

Every page on your blog, whether it's the home page, the individual post page, or an archives page, has what's called a title element. Depending on how your blog is set up, this information probably displays at the top of the browser, and in the tab where you have that page open if your browser does tabbed browsing. As someone who often has a lot of tabs open at once, I really appreciate being able to see which tab is which because of the page titles.

To make your blog more accessible, though, are there any special considerations for what should be in the title? I've blogged before about how special characters in the page title sound when read by screen readers, but what about the content?

The page title is the first thing that screen reader users hear when they get to a page, so it's great if it actually tells them what the page is. If every page on your blog has just the name of the home page, that's not so helpful and could even be disorienting if a reader goes from your home page to one of your posts, or vice versa. If the page title is your blog's name, then the tagline, then the name of the post, that's a whole lot to listen to before knowing exactly where you are.

For more on page titles and how to change yours on your blog, check out Make Your Page Titles Do Their Jobs, a new tip in the Guide to Making Your Blog Accessible. And as always, feedback and corrections are very appreciated.