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?
Walk a mile (or just read a post :-) in someone else's shoes.
We just had our first customer with visual impairments ask for better support from our desktop-based software. She just needed support for the high-contrast display built into Windows XP - white text on a black background and a scheme with larger fonts. She didn't need the whole screen-reader thing. It only took a day or so to make things a lot better for her. There were a bunch of things that didn't surprise me, for example places where we were using a fixed-size font instead of a system-sized font. But there were also some "oops" moments -- light backgrounds work great behind black text, not so much behind white text. Doing the development under the high-contrast display settings was quite the learning experience in and of itself.
I also learned how confusing the Windows XP accessibility settings could be. Even our customer had problems figuring out how to get larger system fonts. [Normally it's in the Display control panel. But when using a high-contrast display it's tucked away in the high-contrast scheme setting.]
Ideally, there'd be a web site where you could load your page and see how it held up against a screen reader or high-contrast displays.
Second-best would be instructions on how to change your settings to try it yourself.