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