This Thursday, May 15 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Of course, web accessibility is important every day, but this is one day where we should focus on it even more.
The organizers suggest a few ways you can easily get involved:
- Use your computer without a mouse for an hour. ((To do this you’ll rely on TAB (move from one link to the next), SHIFT (+ TAB takes you back a link), ENTER (select a link), arrow keys (scrolling, sometimes) and SPACE (select form elements) a lot.))
- Use a screen reader for an hour.
- Browse the web with your fonts set to 200%.
These are all tasks that every website should support well, but many don’t.
Here at MRW Web Design, I work to build accessible websites for my clients so that the internet, a network that holds an astonishing amount of information and is practically a requirement for full participation in many activities, is truly available to everyone.
I also blog about accessibility to try to help loyal blog readers and those who stumble across this site better understand and implement accessibility best practices on their websites. While accessibility may sound like a big, complicated, technical topic, many parts of it are easy and critical to do.
Here are three[ish] accessibility related posts covering topics that apply to anyone writing or editing content on the web:
- “It’s ALT Good: Alternative Text & Accessibility” (See also: “The Alt Text Decision Tree.”)
- “H1: Headings Are Important”
- “Think Before You Link”
And take a moment too, to reread this guest post, from someone who benefits from and implements these practices to make the web a better place.