Making my website more accessible....

[sinisterporpoise]

 I know this is something that will not keep me up at night, although I probably should spend more time thinking about it than I have, and I've come up with two ways to make my site more accessible, and they are within my price range at the moment, although they will not necessarily be the highest quality available.

The first idea was to do a brief podcast that runs down all the major news stories of the site on the week.  I don't intend to recap them word-for-word, but I do think a brief highlights should give people an idea of what I'm talking about.

The second idea is to use video to do the same thing I did in my podcast. I'm not terribly thrilled about the latter idea since I've never been all that big a fan of appearing on video.  

Also, I think I need to start a new blog here just for  backlink purposes. I'd rather not have the people who subscribe to his or my other feed get spammed with promotional links.

I'm not exactly sure how these will help make my site more accessible.  Maybe I should just put each story on audio instead of the podcast idea?

I'm just putting this here because I know Vlad will have ideas I have not considered and I appreciate her feedback. I'll also ask for Feedback on Tumblr, who will have ideas both positive and negative about what I am doing. The latter should not be avoided necessarily.

Comments

[silk_dragon_zen]

Really, I think you ought not to have to go as far as making a podcast or videos.

Instead, web accessibility is more a matter of things like making the site screen-reader accessible and text-to-speech accessible, and when you post image content, doing your best to describe them in the alt text (*not* in tool tips) so screen-readers can read out the descriptions. Also, there's stuff like providing screen-reader-accessible transcripts for audio content (because Braille computers use screen-reading technology, too, to an extent), since there are DeafBlind users who may wish to access content on your site.

And then there's things like making your site's layout not confusing for people navigating by ear (or by touch), and avoiding some of the more irritating anti-copyright-infringement technologies that prevent text-to-speech software from working.

I know there's other stuff to consider, but it's way past my bedtime, so I'm too brain-dead to go looking for free web accessibility tools for you at the moment, but if I can remember some time over the weekend, I'll try to get you that info.

[sinisterporpoise]

Since I've switched over to Wordpress, which just seems easier since I'll probably be the only writer most of the time, this tools should be available in the plugins library, and it should be less of a pain in the posterior to install them than it was with using Drupal or Joomla. I'll have to see if I Can find them.

I still have plans to do videos or podcasts but that's largely to appeal to different audiences. From what I've seen of YouTube, and I don't know if this is just because of the habits of certain members of this household, there need to be fewer socially conservative voices.