All Access Blogging

I've added three new tips to How To Make Your Blog Accessible:

• Pretty Up Your Lists
• Keep Your Sidebars Organized
• Protect Your Email Address The Right Way

As always, I welcome comments, corrections, suggestions, and questions.

I started this blog a year ago on Blogging Against Disablism Day. I had spoken at BlogHer 2006 about making your blog more accessible to people with disabilities, and I had been invited to speak again in 2007. I was trying to organize what I knew and what I was learning about web accessibility, but then translate it into language that would make sense to the army of non-geek bloggers out there.

Many bloggers are not web developers. Many bloggers are not web designers. Many bloggers are not technical. (That's the great thing about blogging - you don't have to be a computer geek to blog.)

And most importantly, many bloggers are using tools that already do things right.

Before asking people to make sure their blogs meet certain accessibility guidelines, I wanted to take into account what their blog tools already do. For example, sending a blogger to check and make sure their post titles are semantically marked up just seems silly. What blog tool these days doesn't do that for you? Maybe you're just trying to teach people about semantic markup, but I'd rather focus on the problem areas first and ask bloggers to fix those.

So I'm making another attempt to finish writing up a basic set of tips that bloggers can easily use to make their blogs more welcoming to people with disabilities (and those of us who can't read purple text on a black background even with our new contacts in.)

A blog is not the best format for a one-stop shop of this kind. Lucky for me, Movable Type 4.x now has Pages, so I am now organizing the tips into one guide called How To Make Your Blog Accessible. As I publish a new tip in the guide, I'll announce it on the blog. (I may also blog about a few other things in the intersection of blogging and accessibility, such as revisiting Ning.com's CAPTCHA issue to see if they've resolved it.)

Here are the updated versions of the previously published tips. I have tried to make them more compact and user-friendly than their previous incarnations.

• Choose Link Colors With Care
• Fight Comment Spam Without Locking Out Your Readers
• Break Your Posts Into Paragraphs
• Label Your Images
• Stop Mystery Meat Linkification

I'd be very glad to get any feedback or corrections, especially from the accessibility experts out there.

Hopefully, by BlogHer 08, I'll be able to point folks to a complete set of tips. What I found in the past two years is that when bloggers become aware of the issue, they make changes. They may not make all of the changes that I'd like them to, but they do care and they take steps to make their blogs more welcoming. Since the content creator ultimately determines whether a shiny new accessible website stays that way, I think that's very good news.

As I mentioned in my last post, November is National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). I am participating on my personal blog. I noticed during signup on the NaBloPoMo website that a visual CAPTCHA is required, with no instructions for people who cannot see or read the CAPTCHA.

Did I mention it in my post here? No. Bad blogger, no biscuit. I did mention it on my personal blog, and in a comment I left on the NaBloPoMo site, but I didn't highlight it here and I didn't contact the company that hosts the NaBloPoMo site to ask that they stop discriminating against people with visual and learning disabilities.

That, my friends, is a great example of privilege. Because the CAPTCHA didn't keep me from participating, even though I am interested enough in accessibility to start a blog about it, I didn't take action. I didn't have to.

Blogger Ginny at Ginny's Thoughts and Things was not so lucky. She is not signed up for NaBloPoMo on the site, because she can't access the CAPTCHA by herself. Blogger Sunni Sister, a friend of Ginny's, took it upon herself to find out more about why there is no alternative for the CAPTCHA. She reported in her post No Mo’ Blo Po Mo? that she emailed Eden Kennedy, the founder of NaBloPoMo, and also searched the site of Ning.com, the company that hosts the site. Apparently there is a blog post on Ning.com from back in July saying that they were interested in adding an audio CAPTCHA but since it would take some time to set up, in the meantime anyone who needed help could email them.

So the signup process for people who can't use the CAPTCHA, unless they want to get someone else to help them, is currently as follows:

1. Try to sign up.
2. Search help section on Ning.com, find nothing.
3. Search the rest of the site, find a blog post from several months ago with instructions.
4. Send an email to Ning and wait for a response.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Ning.com Community Advocate Mackenzie left a comment at Sunni Sister's blog restating that they are glad to help people sign up, but the email address listed in the July blog post is no longer valid and now the request should be submitted through the help center. I can't find anything on the Ning.com site itself that would tell people this. The blog post from July doesn't even come up when I use the site's search and enter CAPTCHA. Also, while I'm glad they're so happy to help - it beats a response of "go jump off a cliff" - emailing to sign up is a pain in the neck.

(Did I mention that Feedburner got an audio CAPTCHA installed for the signups on their email service during their 7-hour Hack-a-thon this past January?)

I didn't think this was news, but let me restate it: people with disabilities are barred from participating on the same terms as everyone else if you use a visual CAPTCHA. Is comment and form spam a big problem? Absolutely yes. Are visual-only CAPTCHAs the solution? Absolutely not. Is NaBloPoMo a life or death situation? No. Does that make it acceptable to discriminate? Absolutely not. Waiting to add accessibility to your site is a way of saying "We just don't think people with disabilities are that important."

Here's hoping that Ning.com can get on the accessibility train! And that I am not so tardy with my actions next time. After I saw Ginny's post, I sent a link to the Ning.com folks, and I'm going to take a few other steps today to call some attention to this issue. Hopefully by next year's NaBloPoMo this will no longer be an issue.

National Blog Posting Month, known as NaBloPoMo, begins tomorrow. Participants commit to posting every day for the month of November. While I don't think that would work for this blog, I am going to use the month of November to get back in the swing of things here at All Access Blogging. Strangely, having a baby (and pregnancy complications before the baby arrived) got me a little off track!

Thanks to everyone who has subscribed, by feed or email, for sticking around while I get it back up and running. I have some ideas about how to reformat the tips to make them easier to digest, and the release of Movable Type 4 also means more information to cover. Eventually I think the content will be migrated to a wiki for ease of maintenance, but for right now I'm going to stick with the blog format I know and love.

Welcome to NaBloPoMo!

Welcome to BlogHer 2007 attendees and other visitors. This post is an add-on for a presentation I'm giving this afternoon with Virginia DeBolt covering web standards, accessibility, optimizing your blog for mobile devices, and microformats.

Materials:

• Our Presentation: Why do bloggers care about web standards? (PDF)
• My Handout: Everyone Should Be Reading Your Blog, Right? (Word document)

Here are the topics covered in the handout and my part of the presentation, with links to the posts on All Access Blogging that give more details and instructions for how to make them happen with the different blogging tools. This blog is definitely a work in progress, so for a few topics, I haven't yet created tutorials. To receive updates as I add topics to the blog, sign up for the All Access Blogging feed or subscribe by email. It's a low volume blog, but I hope the materials I am putting together are helpful and practical.

• Break Up Your Post Into Paragraphs
• Make Your Link Text Meaningful
• Headings are Headings, Lists are Lists, Quotes are Quotes - coming soon
• Background, Text, and Links - some of this is covered in Check Your Link Colors, You May Need to Redecorate
• Don't Open New Windows Without Warning People - coming soon
• Label Your Images
• Resist Visual CAPTCHAs
• Make Your Content Easy To Find - coming soon
• Check Those Widgets - coming soon, but in the meantime see Rate Your Blog, but Don't Forget Accessibility for an example of a widget that needs a little work before it's accessible.

I always welcome advice, feedback, corrections, and questions. Especially if the instructions given don't actually work for your blogging software, I'd really like to know so I can update or correct the tips. Please feel free to comment on the post in question or send me an email at skyekilaen@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Tag: blogher07

I'm off to the BlogHer conference today, both to enjoy the conference and to give a presentation about making your blog more accessible. I met law blogger J. Craig Williams after I gave a similar presentation last year. Craig is a blogger with some serious technical muscle behind his law blog, May It Please The Court. He also stands out as a blogger who has given serious thought to accessibility as his blog has developed.

Thanks to Craig for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer some of my questions about his blog's target audience, why he has made accessibility a priority, and what features have been incorporated into his blog to make it more accessible.

Here we go.

Craig, how would you describe your blog?

May It Please The Court (MIPTC) focuses mainly on current legal cases of interest to the firm's clients and potential clients - especially cases within the areas where our firm practices law. I also cover the occasional oddball case or legal event that seems interesting. I find if the subject interests me, it seems to likewise interest my readers, at least so far.

MIPTC also includes a weekly, half-hour podcast of "Lawyer 2 Lawyer," an Internet radio show I do on the Legal Talk Network with another lawyer in Massachusetts, Bob Ambrogi. We cover current legal news and usually have three or so guests on the show.

Can you tell me a little bit about how your blogging intersects with your law practice? (Aside from not leaving you a lot of spare time!)

Blogging about legal cases requires that I read those decisions as they come out, which has the effect of making me better informed about current legal developments than I was before I started blogging. It's been a real boon to my continuing education, and I'm more tuned in to current events, as well, given all the reading I do on the Internet.

How much do you know about who reads your blog? Who do you imagine as your audience?

I have poured over the stats, which report a significant amount of information, even allowing me to drill down to the identity of an individual computer accessing the site. MIPTC surprisingly has readers from all over the world, with many from European countries, Russia, Asia, South America and Australia, although the great majority are from the United States. As just one example of its reach, on a recent trip to Australia, I was surprised to run into one of my readers who spotted me from having seen my photo on MIPTC. My readers include many business owners, other lawyers, judges, justices, law clerks, legislators, law professors and students and even Supreme Court law clerks.

I'm heading off to the BlogHer conference in a couple of days to introduce more bloggers to the basics of accessibility. In honor of this occasion, I thought I would share a couple of interviews with folks I had the pleasure to meet in connection with last year's BlogHer.

Nickie of the blog Nickie's Nook was not at BlogHer last year, but she commented on a post I had created to document the accessibility presentation I gave at that conference. This year, she was gracious enough to fit in an email interview around her classes, finals, and self-publishing a book called Nickie's Nook: Sharing the Journey that contains her essays and blog posts. (Coincidentally, Nickie chose to publish with Lulu.com, which had a table at BlogHer last year. See, the world is really very small.)

Thanks to Nickie for answering my questions about her blog, the assistive technology she uses, and website accessibility in general.

Let's get started.

Nickie, could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

I am a junior at a private women's college, majoring in social work. My interests include medicine, psychology, dogs, reading, blindness issues and, of course, blogging. I travel with Julio, a male yellow lab from Guide Dogs for the Blind.

This tip has moved to its new home:

Fight Comment Spam Without Locking Out Your Readers

Online dating site Mingle2 is offering a cool widget for your blog. You enter your blog's address, and it gives you a film-style rating based on its content.

What's My Blog Rated? thinks this blog is G rated. Here is the result when I copy and paste their suggested code into my blog entry:

Mingle² - Online Dating

However, there's something wrong with this picture. Some of you will have already figured it out. The first tip on All Access Blogging, Label Your Images, showed how to add alternative information (called alt text) to images so that people visiting your site with screen readers or text-only browsers can tell what's going on.

Sighted readers see a film rating above.

People relying on the alt text hear or see "Online Dating."

My guess is that Mingle2 is trying to harness the alt text to influence search engine ratings by including their preferred term as alt text. Unfortunately, in so doing, they are going against the primary purpose of alt text, which is to provide alternative information for the image so people who can't access the image aren't left out. While I think it's fine (and generous) for Mingle2 to create a widget like this for bloggers in order to promote their site, breaking the alt text is NOT the way to do it.

If you're going to rate your blog, do your visitors with disabilities a favor and fix the code in this widget! Go ahead and paste it into your blog, but where you see this:

alt="Online Dating"

Replace it with something like this:

alt="This blog is rated G, click here to rate your blog"

Your new alt text will let your visitors know what's happening in the picture, and why the image is a link.

This tip has moved to its new home:

Stop Mystery Meat Linkification