When you visit this website, if you look to the right of your screen, you’ll see a couple of icons in a vertically oriented grey rectangle. The top icon is a black circle that is half open, half solid. The lower icon has two black letter Ts in capital case, but of different sizes.
You’ll also notice that these icons stay in place whether you move the image by scrolling up and down or by using your arrow keys.
The top button allows you to shift to a high contrast screen:
The lower button allows you to increase the font size:
Try them out!
These features allow the website to be more accessible to the visually impaired. You may not see it, but I’ll also endeavour to attach “alt text” for each picture so that people who use screen readers can get a description of the visual image.
I’m able to do this using the WP Accessibility plug-in, something I’m still learning to navigate.
When I started this website, I wanted to make it as barrier-free as possible, inspired by my family’s history with eye diseases and by the Canadian author Jean Little, who was one of my childhood favourites, and who has been legally blind since birth.
There’s more to accessibility than helping people who are visually impaired, of course. For example, if I ever post an audio file, I’ll be sure to include a transcript so that people who are deaf or hard of hearing can access the information as well.
For more information about accessibility online, here’s a link to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative: https://www.w3.org/WAI/
It was Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the Consortium and the inventor of the World Wide Web, who said:
“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”
I think that the steps I’ve taken here are a good start, although I fully realize I may not have captured everything. Please feel free to correct me!
Copyright 2018 Jessica Allyson
