Week 4 blog reflection
Making Photos accessible in WordPress – adding alt text to my photo
Making Videos accessible in WordPress – Adding closed captions to my YouTube video.
Making my Blog accessible in WordPress – Adding properly formatted headings and hyperlinks.
I think the main reason digital accessibility practices aren’t well-known or commonly used is because people are selfish. I know that might sound a bit harsh but every excuse to not create accommodations I could think of all circled back to the same place – it is seen as an inconvenience to those who don’t rely on it. But think of how inconvenient it would be to need those accommodations and never have them available. Those without a disability are concerned about the cost, the visual appeal, or the time it takes to set it up. Sometimes they even decide it’s optional and opt-out or they simply just place the blame on the developer but in the end it comes back to the “It doesn’t effect me so it is not important” mentality. Obviously, there are a few cases where we can blame ignorance or naivety but only if accommodations are put in place once brought to light. If you would like to further educate yourself on digital accessibility I found this blog by the Bureau of Internet Accessibility which has daily blog posts covering any digital accessibility question you may have.
For example, today we discussed colour contrast and I realized that my website had a busy patterned background with a thin serif font, but I had a light coloured background with a dark font. From my perspective I thought it was easily readable because of the colour contrast but had thought nothing about how the pattern would make the thin font hard to discern, since than I found a thicker plain font and changed my background so it would be legible for anyone who may have low vision. Using the WebAIM colour contrast checker I reevaluated my websites new design and found that the changes I made let my blog pass all of the WCAG AA and AAA tests.
The digital accessibility practice that shocked me the most would most definitely be choosing the proper wording and formatting. I have never used a screen reader and was unfamiliar with how they actually work, so I did some reading and found this blogpost on screen readers which I thought was very insightful. It walked me through the use of screen readers and how it reacts to different types of media. I was extremely unaware of how the formatting of headings and hyperlinks effects how the screen reader replicates the information. I knew that the formatting of a website would change, but was naive to the difference of creating a one-lined paragraph as a header versus the actual header option. I was shocked by the screen readers formatting of the hyperlinks and never thought about whether or not the hyperlink made sense without the context surrounding it.
