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Glenda Watson Hyatt, for those of you who don't know yet, is a woman on a mission: helping bloggers understand web accessibility. Yes, our armies are gathering strength!

Glenda recently had the opportunity to present at SOBCon: Biz School for Bloggers, and apparently it went quite well! You can read more about her presentation, or make sure you download her e-book on blog accessibility.

I find Glenda's success heartening, for a couple of reasons. First, she had an opportunity to present to a large number of bloggers who were fairly new to the topic. I think many people who have presented on accessibility would agree that if you advertise a session on accessibility or web standards, a smaller number of people show up than would be there if you advertised a session on "web design tips" or "search engine optimization." Also, attendees at an accessibility session are generally people who already know something about the subject. I'm not sure how SOBCon works, but it sounds from the feedback around the web that Glenda managed to reach a large number of "accessibility newbies" and their eyes were really opened.

Second, it's great to see the commenters on Glenda's post mentioning that they are trying to improve the accessibility of their blogs in concrete ways based on her presentation. It's good to open people's eyes, but to create change, they have to take action.

So hurray for accessibility outreach to bloggers! If you haven't checked out Glenda's e-book yet, make sure you do!

Over at the mighty WebAIM blog, there's an invitation to screen reader users to complete a survey about their preferences for how web sites are set up. There are several questions in the survey which I find particularly interesting from a blogging perspective:

The question "How difficult are different links with the same text repeated multiple times on the same page?" covers quite a few cases in blogging. The words comment, comments, permalink, more, and others are often used with each post, meaning up to 15 or 20 instances on the main page of a blog. For people who are familiar with the blog format, do these still cause trouble?

"How difficult are pop-up windows to you?" makes me think of Haloscan comments on blogger blogs. Do they cause problems for people using screen readers?

The question about how often users "navigate by headings" is relevant to the next section of the Guide to Making Your Blog Accessible that I'm working on - how do you break up a long post (or even sidebar) into sections that help your readers navigate?

If you're a screen reader user, take the survey when you get a chance, and spread the word.

I recently started using Google's browser Chrome since I was having some some issues with Firefox. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

For a few days, though, I was convinced that one of the sites I read regularly was completely broken, because it looked HORRIBLE all of a sudden. I knew the blogger had been planning a redesign, so I assumed she was just in the middle of rearranging. Then I looked at her blog again in Firefox, and it was still just fine. Oops!

It reminded me that I'd bookmarked Workin' it on all browsers from the Official Google Webmaster Central blog a couple of months ago, so I dug it up and read it.

Their first tip for webmasters is "Ensure browser compatibility by focusing on accessibility." I perked up a bit - do they mean what I think they mean? Sadly, no. When they say accessibility, they mean using simpler HTML instead of "fancy features like AJAX."

Their second tip, though, is key both for cross-browser compatibility and for accessibility as we discuss it on this blog: Consider validating your code to ensure it conforms with web standards. The more that websites and blogs are built in accordance with web standards, the easier it is on your visitors who are using assistive technology - and the more likely that your blog will work properly in all modern browsers.

So validating my code is definitely one of my New Year's resolutions for all my blogs. Now if only there were a web standard creating an extra two hours a day in 2009 for all webmasters...

I posted about making blog quizzes friendly to your blog's readers who have disabilities. Related to that topic, I do need to mention one more thing:

NINJAS!

The Ninja Text Generator really cracks me up.

Remember what we learned about blog quizzes? The "alt" label in the code for images is often not so helpful to people using screen readers to listen to your blog.

The default code for the image above just says "Ninja!" While amusing, it doesn't reflect the text of the image, which is actually "Accessibility."

So I turned this:

alt="Ninja!"

Into this:

alt="Accessibility! Make your own animated ninja text."

It says what the image says, and it says where the link goes. Accessible ninjas for everyone!

A few days ago, I posted about adjacent non-underlined links in blog posts and the trouble they can cause for your readers with (and without!) visual disabilities. I've also written a section of How To Make Your Blog Accessible that deals with choosing a link color that your readers can actually distinguish from your text if for some reason you can't stand to underline your links.

The following quote is relevant to both of those topics and I just had to share it. It's by By Joe Clark, from his book Building Accessible Websites

It is bad usability and certainly bad accessibility to force people to scrub the mouse all over the screen until the cursor changes into a link indicator because they have no other way of finding the links on the page.

I couldn't have said it better myself.