Accessibility For Bloggers: Starting From Where They Are

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.)