30 days to a more accessible website

June 25, 2002 9:00 PM

30 days to a more accessible website This series is entitled "30 days to a more accessible weblog", and it will answer two questions. The first question is "Why should I make my weblog more accessible?" If you do not have a weblog, this series is not for you. The second question is "How can I make my weblog more accessible?" If you are not convinced by the first answer, you will not be interested in the second.
posted by mikewas (10 comments total)

Starting Monday, and over the next five weeks, I will present tips that you can immediately apply to your own weblog template to make it more accessible. Although these concepts apply to all web sites, I will be focusing on implementation using popular weblogging tools.

Mark uses five exemplar web readers, each with a different accessibility challenge, and shows clearly how to make small but important changes to your website to ensure that everyone can actully read them.

Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus will thank you for your attention.
posted by mikewas at 9:00 PM on June 25, 2002

Next up: how to make your lemonade stand more appealing to the people passing by on the freeway on the other side of town.
posted by GriffX at 9:04 PM on June 25, 2002

Hmmn, on one of my pages, I appear have hit upon a color scheme which makes most of my information invisible to prying eyes with red-green colorblindness-- and aren't most of those people male? Are certain color schemes inherently discriminatory and unethical?
posted by sheauga at 9:23 PM on June 25, 2002

this is a really nice series. i've been following it and have learned a good bit.
posted by o2b at 9:42 PM on June 25, 2002

I too have found some of the ideas to be quite useful. I'm an advocate of usability and I appreciate the work that he's done to help other people know how to make their sites easier to use.
posted by jaden at 11:29 PM on June 25, 2002

Hmm, I'm colorblind and I need a tool to show me how my webpages look to "normal" people. I guess you'd have to invert some equations. Make sure I don't overuse purple, which I like to call "blue" for short.
posted by Wood at 11:35 PM on June 25, 2002

Thanks for the very informative link, mikewas.
posted by JoyG_n Josh at 4:05 AM on June 26, 2002

My best advice is not to make a weblog that takes five minutes to download at 56k. I've seen a lot of those in my day; never went back though.
posted by mark13 at 6:28 AM on June 26, 2002

I like that so far he's keeping very strictly to accessibility. Often people start with a cry for accessibility and end in a mandate for tableless, all-compliant hoity-toity websites. (Perhaps he'll go over the edge by Day 30?) Anyway, something he hasn't gotten to yet is the simple double site version: the lofi alternative (which some of us have no choice but to implement as the only accessible choice). Here's MeFi and MeFi LoFi doing everything right on the Lynx text reader. Dreamy!
posted by RJ Reynolds at 7:11 AM on June 26, 2002

Not only is he writing something really useful on accessibility, his writing is also very accessible. Making it easy and enjoyable to follow the series for people who are not usability experts. And that way, motivating "normal" people (like me) to improve the design of their personal websites.

Compare for instance http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980111.html and http://diveintomark.org/archives/#day_14_adding_titles_to_links.
posted by roel at 12:36 PM on June 27, 2002