October 2009 Archives

Another fairly stream of consciousness post, sorry folks. Writing this stuff out is helping me think through it, but I promise not to take offense if you unsubscribe. In November I plan to get back to actual content, but for the next few days, it's my blog and I need to use it to think!

I've been thinking a lot lately about why creating accessibility outreach materials targeted at bloggers needs to be different than all the great materials that are out there about web accessibility in general. I definitely don't want to be duplicating effort.

Bloggers come in a wide variety of skill levels, from those who still have trouble with sending email to those who are coders and programmers. My guess is that most blogs are maintained by people on the lower end of the technical spectrum. Look at the sheer number of blogs hosted on Blogger, WordPress.com, and LiveJournal. Sure, some of those folks are coders and programmers, but most are not.

Because of this guess, I'd been conceptualizing the information I'm trying to organize as split between "things you can do when you're posting" and "things you can change on your blog overall." So far, so good. However, that line of thinking lumped in a tip like "change your text and background color" with "create skip navigation links" as "things you can change on your blog overall."

Even the most fearful of the content creator bloggers, though, is likely using a publishing tool that makes it fairly easy to change your text and background colors.

And even the hardiest of the content creator bloggers who have learned a little bit about their templates might not get how to properly use headings right away - and headings in posts often require some CSS work.

So I'm going to take a little time and reorganize the tips I've already written and pencil in the ones I think are left. Something like skip navigation links is a great idea for the content creator bloggers who have already gotten their alt text, link text, and color schemes in order, so I'm going to put that near the bottom of the list.

And when bloggers are at the technical level where they want to tackle skip navigation links, I'm pretty sure they can take care of it from one of the existing resources out there - so instead of spending time writing tutorials, I should curate the good ones and link to them.

That will hopefully mean I'm done with writing sooner and can move on to action.

(Except that, of course, TypePad updated itself and now I have to recheck how everything works.)

Allright, y'all, time to confess. When I started this blog, it was not because I wanted to blog about accessibility. There are lots of accessibility blogs. There are lots of GREAT accessibility blogs. Being read by people who already care about accessibility.

What I really want is to reach out to the bloggers who don't already care about accessibility. To do that, though, I felt like I needed to get all my information organized. If I was going to say "hey, you need to make your blog accessible!" then I should be prepared to tell them how, including instructions for their blogging platform. That's what I so appreciated about Dive Into Accessibility.

This blog basically came about as a way for me to make progress in organizing my material. A blog format tugs at your sleeve when you don't work on it for very long. Obviously it's been in fits and starts. Part of that is how long it takes to do each section of the Guide. I think it's about 6-8 hours for each section that includes step-by-steps for the various blogging platforms. I struggle with how to present it in a way that's understandable to non-technical people without dumbing it down. I struggle with what level of support will help people who have never edited HTML or CSS in their lives. It's hard to figure out where to stop - at some point, people will be interested enough in accessibility that they can "graduate" to reading the accessibility blogs I read, which are overwhelmingly targeted at geeks rather than the person who started a blog on Blogger or WordPress.com just because they liked to write.

I've also been feeling stuck because I wasn't sure what to do when I got done.

While I've been away from the blog, though, dealing with a bunch of family issues, a plan has started to percolate. The plan I'm forming, means concentrating on the basics and treating some topics as "extra credit" ideas, because the people I'm interested in reaching are often not very technical. Getting those folks to remove the major accessibility barriers seems like as good a goal as getting a small number of people to push their blogs to the bleeding edge of accessibility.

So my goal is to get the Guide done, meaning usable, by the end of the year. Then I can start 2010 in outreach mode, trying to make the blogosphere more accessible rather than just writing about it.

My question for you, my readers who are already interested in accessibility: if you had to ask people to do just 5 or 6 things, rather than 25 things, what would those things be? Where should people start?