ContentRobot

In the final post of our Blog Accessibility Series, ContentRobot provides some tips to helping your design your blog for a wider audience.

1. Use Relative Font Sizes
Express font sizes in percentages or ems, rather than absolute font sizes expressed in points or pixels. The allows users to make the text larger or smaller as they wish.

2. Design & Label Your Forms Properly
Lay out your forms logically and consistently, make proper use of labels, and avoid client-side scripts and radio buttons will make your web forms much more accessible to users who are visually impaired.

3. Write Effective Alt-Text
Think about the difference between “Click Here” verses “Download the ContentRobot WordPress Theme” when creating your alt tags. More tips:

• Brief is better.
• Put the most essential information first.
• Meaningless graphics, such as spacers, do not need meaningful text.
• Maintain the alt-text. If your navigation was rearranged, don’t forget to move the alt-text, too. Otherwise, users may get lost.
• Spell words correctly.

4. Test and Validate

• Check out the free W3C Markup Validation Service.
• Validate syntax (e.g., HTML, XML, etc.) and style sheets (e.g., CSS).
• Test using a text-only browser or emulator.
• Test for these conditions: sounds and graphics loaded, graphics not loaded, sounds not loaded, no mouse, frames, scripts, style sheets, and applets not loaded
• View your site in several browsers, old and new, and on different platforms, Mac and PC.
• Use a self-voicing browser, a screen reader, magnification software, a small display, etc.
• Use spell and grammar checkers. A person reading a page with a speech synthesizer may not be able to decipher the synthesizer’s best guess for a word with a spelling error.

5. Invite People with Disabilities to Review Documents
Expert and novice users with disabilities will provide valuable feedback about accessibility or usability problems and their severity.

For More Information About Creating Accessible Web Sites
Explore the Web Accessibility area of the American Foundation for the Blind site, or visit the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Related Posts: Is Your Blog Accessible to People With Disabilities? and Design Your Blog to Be More Accessible to a Wider Audience

The World Web Web Consortium has published guidelines to help designers make their sites more accessible. ContentRobot has summarized some key points below.

• Make multimedia content (images, video, and audio) more accessible to a wide audience. This can be done using text equivalents (often rendered with Alt tags within HTML documents). Text can be rendered in ways that are available to almost all browsing devices and accessible to almost all users.
• Provide non-text equivalents (e.g., pictures, videos, and pre-recorded audio) for text to offer visual cues that convey the same information. This can be beneficial non-readers or people who have difficulty reading.
• Ensure that text and graphics are understandable when viewed without color. Some people cannot differentiate between certain colors and users with devices that have non-color or non-visual displays will not receive the information.
• Separate structure from presentation and content by ensuring that HTML and CSS markup is coded properly. Mark up documents with the proper structural elements and control presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements and attributes. Misusing markup for a presentation effect (e.g., using a table for layout or a header to change the font size) makes it difficult for some users to understand the organization of the page or navigate through it.
• Ensure that pages are accessible even when newer technologies (using Flash or Javascript, for example) are not supported or are turned off. Some users still work with older browsers and some choose to turn off newer features. Finally, if the interface of the embedded object cannot be made accessible, an alternative accessible solution must be provided.
• Create documents that do not rely on one type of hardware. Pages should be usable by people without mice, with small screens, low resolution screens, black and white screens, no screens, with only voice or text output, etc.
• Provide a clear and consistent navigation, including orientation information, navigation bars, a site map, etc. This increases the likelihood that a person of any ability will find what they are looking for at a site.
• Provide a consistent page layout, recognizable graphics, and easy-to-understand language benefits all users as it promotes effective communication.

In sum
There are a variety of simple guidelines that designers, developers, and content providers can do to make their blog pages more accessible to persons of all abilities. We’ll even delve deeper with more accessibility tips in our next post.

Related Posts: Is Your Blog Accessible to People With Disabilities? and Tips & Tricks to Improve Blog Accessibility

Blog designers should consider ways to make Web content more available to all users, and help people find information more quickly.

Consider that many users may be operating in contexts very different from your own. Have you thought about these issues while designing your blog?

Web Surfing Devices
Websites can be viewed from a desktop or laptop browser, voice browser, mobile phone, automobile-based personal computer, etc. Can your users connect to your blog using all these devices?

Hardware Constraints
Users may only have access to a text-only screen, a small screen, or even a slow Internet connection. While broadband is more available, there are some users who do not have it.

Browser Versions
Users may have an early version of a browser, a different browser entirely, a voice browser, or a different operating system. Have you designed for the more popular browsers on the Mac, PC, and Linux platforms?

Language Barriers
Users may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the document is written. It may be necessary to consider linking to online translators (like Bablefish).

Environmental Issues
Noisy surroundings, under- or over-illuminated rooms, in a hands-free environment, for example, may all be valid issues for a difficult surfing experience.

Physical or Developmental Disabilities
There are many issues that fall under this category. Some to consider are:

• Users may not be able to see, hear, move.
• They may not be able to process some types of information easily or at all, including difficulty reading or comprehending text.
• Not all users can make use of visual clues such as image maps, proportional scroll bars, side-by-side frames, or graphics that guide sighted users of graphical desktop browsers.
• Users also lose contextual information when they can only view a portion of a page, either because they are accessing the page one word at a time (speech synthesis or braille display), or one section at a time (small display, or a magnified display).
• Without better orientation information, users may not be able to understand very large tables, lists, menus, etc.
• Some users might not have or not be able to use a keyboard or mouse.

Related Posts: Design Your Blog to Be More Accessible to a Wider Audience and Tips & Tricks to Improve Blog Accessibility