This is part of the series the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media.

Social media gives voices to individuals marginalized and ignored by traditional media, enabling the world to hear these voices for the first time in history.

However, as in the physical world, the online world poses many barriers to people with disabilities:

• Images without text equivalents (ALTs in html lingo) are inaccessible to individuals with vision impairments using text-to-speech screen readers.
• Video and audio without captions or transcripts are inaccessible to people who deaf and hard of hearing or to those who don’t understand the speaker’s accent.
• Hyperlink text that blends in with surrounding text (or that isn’t underlined) are difficult for people with low vision to spot.
• Short, one-word hyperlinks are difficult for people with limited hand function to click on.
• Flickering and flashing images and animations can cause seizures in some individuals.
• CAPTCHAs, images of obscured letters and numbers designed to separate the humans from the robots, are “Do Not Enter” signs for those who are blind and are confusing for those with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia.
• And the list goes on.

The good news is simple solutions can tear down these barriers, further enabling these previously silenced voices to be heard and to fully participate online and in social media.

This primer reading list explores web accessibility issue, and offers tips and tools for implementing solutions:

• How to Add Captions to Your YouTube Videos (Mashable)
• Are All Video Captions Equally Accessible? (Do It Myself Blog)
• 5 Reasons Why Bloggers and Web Designers Should Consider Accessibility (Do It Myself Blog)
• How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog Accessibility (Blogaccessibility)
• What Makes a Blog Theme Accessible? (Do It Myself Blog)
• Open Source Screen Reader Gives Sighted Individuals a Glimpse into the Blind World (Do It Myself Blog)
• What Technologies Do People with Disabilities Use to Read Blogs? (Do It Myself Blog)
• Four Parties Contribute to an Accessible Blogosphere (Do It Myself Blog)
• Can Your Blog Readers Find Your Hyperlinks? (Do It Myself Blog)
• 3 Tips for Making Your Hyperlinks More Usable (Do It Myself Blog)
• 5 Ways to Increase the Accessibility of Blogs (Do It Myself Blog)
• Web Accessibility Not Only for People with Disabilities (Do It Myself Blog)
• Social media – barrier or tool for inclusion? (Onlineopinion)

Have an accessibility-related question?

Have an accessibility-related question? Ask Glenda!

For 10 years Glenda Watson Hyatt has worked with three levels of government, transit authorities and non-profit organizations to increase the accessibility of their websites for people with disabilities. Glenda blogs at Do It Myself Blog about various accessibility-related issues, including web and blog accessibility. She does all this by typing with only her left thumb! She’s a remarkable person.

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up.

In this series

• How to make your website more accessible (JD Lasica at Socialbrite)

• 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities (JD Lasica at Socialbrite)

• How to make your blog more accessible (JD Lasica video interview with Skye Kilaen at BlogHer 2006)

The post How to make social media ‘wheelchair accessible’ appeared first on Socialbrite.

Enhancing website accessibility from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

A few weeks back, at SOBCon busniess school for bloggers in Chicago, I met Glenda Watson Hyatt, a remarkable trainer and conference speaker who gave a presentation on how to make websites and blogs more accessible to the disabled. Glenda, who has cerebral palsy, deals with computer accessibility issues on a daily basis. I wrote about her advice on Socialbrite: 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities.

After Glenda’s talk and one by Lorelle VanFossen, author of “Blogging Tips” — Lorelle has occasional memory lapses because of traumatic brain injury — I captured some of their advice regarding how to make sure your website or blog accessible to disabled people.

Lorelle says that fully 60 percent of all sites on the Web are not accessible to the disabled — so pay attention, yours may be one. They discuss specific steps website operators and bloggers can take to make their sites and blogs accessible, including adding simple things like alt tags, captions and underlined links.

Tips to make your site more accessible to disabled users

• Include “alt” tags (alternative descriptions) and title tags in all images and videos.

• Make your links look like links. Use colors that distinguish them from regular text and use an underline to set them apart.

• Make your body text legible. The 0.8em default on some blog platforms is just too small for millions of readers out there. Usability should be your paramount concern — not all your readers are under 30!

• Also, make sure your stylesheet permits variable font sizes. If you’re using a fixed font, older browsers don’t let users adjust text size. (In Firefox and IE, you can hit command + or – to increase or decrease the size of the text on screen.)

• Give your photos captions, so the vision-impaired can know what they’re looking at.

• Provide a paragraph of summary for your videos and audio podcasts — or, if possible, a transcript. Because search engines can’t see or hear but can only “read” text, your posts will do better in search results, too. And don’t forget to add relevant links to your post.

• Don’t use “click here” as a link. Instead, offer context about what it’s about and link the relevant words.

We made sure to launch Socialbrite with these features in mind, but if you see some shortcomings on our site, let us know!

Lorelle told of one deaf friend whose children are also deaf. “Her kids are growing up in a world filled with video, and they can’t participate.”

About one in four people on the Web is disabled in some way, Lorelle says. And yet 60 percent of all sites fail basic accessibility tests. She and Glenda will be working with @Beanfair on an “Integration Camp” to break down the able-disabled mythology.

“Let’s quit the labels, let’s quit the judging, and find the value in the human being,” she says beautifully.

The video’s lighting and sound are not optimal, but I knew there was something special about capturing Glenda and Lorelle on video together. It’s 15 minutes long.

Watch, embed or download the original video from Vimeo

Related

• 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities (Socialbrite)

• How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog Accessibility (free ebook from Glenda Watson Hyatt)

• Doitmyselfblog (Glenda Watson Hyatt)

• lorelle.wordpress.com (Lorelle VanFossen)

• Sue Center is a communication environment designed specifically for people who cannot use a keyboard or mouse

The post How to make your website more accessible appeared first on Socialbrite.