Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

How And Why You Should Make Your Blog Accessible To People With Disabilities

June 4, 2009 | Blogging, Feature

This is a guest post by Tom Babinszki, the director of Even Grounds, an accessibility consulting company.

In the United States, in average one out of every six people live with some kind of a disability. This ratio is even higher in some other countries. People with disabilities, just like anybody else, want to use the internet. As a matter of fact, statistics show that they are more likely to use the computer to compensate for their disabilities than others.

The difficulty people with disabilities face is that many sites on the internet are not accessible; difficult to use with a screen reader, a voice recognition system, or just hard to make sense of, in general.

With little effort, there is a way to make your blog much more accessible, theoretically reaching out to twenty percent more readers.

Choosing the right platform

The accessibility of a blog depends on two factors: the platform you use, and the way you edit your posts.

If you are planning to start your blog, investigate if the platform of your choice is accessible. Most likely you will find some information about accessibility on the software’s web site. But you can always ask the accessibility experts, on the Accessify Forum (opens in new window) there’s always somebody to give you a hand.

Once you pick a platform, you will have to pick a theme/template/style. Also, make sure you read the accessibility reviews of the selected theme, this also contributes a lot to your blog’s accessibility.

Describe pictures

Many people who browse the internet are totally blind and use a screen reader to read your blog. When you post images which are important to understand your message, make sure you describe those images. Many blogging platforms will allow you to attach alternative texts to images (ALT tags). If the image is there to enhance the visual appearance of your site, but does not carry information, it is not necessary to describe it.

Transcribe or caption videos

Other people who use the internet cannot hear. It is becoming more and more popular to post videos with audio. People with hearing impairment are not able to enjoy this content by default. In order to make it accessible, you could transcribe your audio content into regular text and post it with your video. An even better solution is to provide captioning. This might be more costly, but nowadays there are free tools which are easy to use to caption content. YouTube allows captioning your videos. (Opens in new window)

Use descriptive link text

You can greatly add to the ease of your site’s navigation if you properly describe in the link text what you link to. Instead of saying “Click here to determine if your web site is accessible!”, you should say “Determine if your web site is accessible!”

Allow users to interact with you

In many cases bloggers require users to sign into a platform or create an account in order to make comments or interact with the blogger. This method majorly cuts down on spam. However, you have probably seen sign-up forms where you have to enter a word from an image in order to validate your registration. It is called CAPTCHA. Unfortunately it is not accessible to visually impaired people.

You can still use such solutions, but make sure that there is an alternative. Some CAPTCHAs contain an audio alternative, but many of those are not accessible to people with cognitive disabilities.

The bottom line

There is so much more to say about accessibility, but if you implement my suggestions above, you have opened a communication channel to many more people. If you are not sure if something is accessible, put yourself into the shoes of people with disabilities, and you will be able to tell.

Tom Babinszki, the director of Even Grounds, is an expert of making technology accessible for people with disabilities. He has worked globally with governments, corporations, and educational institutions as a consultant. He is the author of a blog and numerous articles to share information about the accessibility of technology.

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  • tombabinszki
    Jennifer,

    You can actually provide access to all people, and still moderate your comments. What CAPTCHA does is checking if a real person is commenting on your site. There are many other ways to check for it. Also, just because you allow a real person to comment, it might still be spam, so aside from whom you allow to comment on your site, you can still elect to moderate comments or allow them to show right away.

    Tom
  • Full disclosure: Someone very close to me is deaf, but I have also just always been sensitive to the needs of the disabled.

    I am not sure if I tag my photos just the right way, but I am going to work on that. Also, as much as I like moderating comments before they are posted to my blog, I will probably either see if Blogger has a way around this or just bite the bullet and not moderate (I really don't like that idea...)
  • I work for a federal contractor so recently attended a short session on what's called 508 Compliance--Web sites associated with the fed are starting to be required to be 508 compliant (ie, accessible.)

    I try to make sure that, whenever I post a video to my blog, I either include a transcript, or have a captioned version available, or have a link to an accessible version. This is just because I WANT to, though, not because I feel obligated.

    Thank you for sharing this post. I think it's a very important issue.
  • A very interesting post. I too had never considered this. Thank you.
  • Very unique and interesting post. However, I never thought that a disabled person will visit at my site.
  • I also never considered a person with a disability looking at my site. Greg Ellison
  • To be completely honest... I've never really considered handicap accessibility for my website. =/ I'll be reanalyzing my content to see what I can do to make it easier to digest. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
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