Making accessible blog posts

[sasha_feather]

Nerdy PSA at hope's journal is a great post on how to make your website or blog more accessible using basic HTML.

One of my big pet peeves that I see people do quite frequently, is hyperlink to things without describing what they are linking to.

For example,
BAD:

I am reading this right now!

GOOD:

I am reading The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm by Nancy Farmer right now.

I don't want to have to click on your link just to find out what the heck you are talking about. It's irritating. And I'm not trying to pick on any one person here, because I have seen at least two dozen people do variations of this problem. Sometimes for creative reasons, like using "ZOMG" as their hyperlink label when they are excited. But that is just as bad. As hope points out, for someone using a screen reader, when they hear "ZOMG" or "here" that is not very helpful for knowing where the link goes. I TOO FIND IT ANNOYING. (And I'm not holding this against you personally! It's just a part of blogging culture that I want to shift.)

[eta: I lay this out some more in comments at LJ.]

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Also Access related, bibliofile, goblingirl and I were talking about con-related access things the other day, and bibliofile had this idea of making a Con Access Wiki. Something that everyone could read, with centralized information for how to do access at a con. Probably it would have to have restricted editing privileges. But the centralization would be nice, so that each con did not have to re-invent the wheel. And it would reduce barriers because you wouldn't have to know who to talk to to find things out, or get over your social anxiety to do so.

What do you guys think? Just an idea I'm pondering. Cons in this case means both conventions and conferences.

Comments

[dersteinkauz.livejournal.com]

I actually just turned in a report for my Information Architecture class on how we're going to make our website redesign accessible to people with disabilities. The DoIT site that I'm linking to is a helpful starting point for folks and talks a lot about coding, using alt-text, and other descriptors when creating a site.

http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/online-course/start.htm