Archive for the ‘accessibility’ tag
On Accessibility and This Blog
Since starting my job lat month as a ‘computer literacy tutor’ with/for disabled adults in southeast Melbourne, I have become acutely aware of how difficult it can be for some members of our society (in this case Australia) to access certain institutions, services and cultural experiences. These are things that individuals without disability often take for granted, and addressing them goes far beyond wheelchair ramps at the courthouse or braille consoles on public elevators. It’s more complex than that. Actually, it pretty much includes everything… even the web.
Last week, Xu Yan, who has been teaching herself all about CSS, discovered that my website is not particularly HTML compatible. After the initial annoyance of this fact wore off, it got me thinking about universal access. Right now the vast majority of people around the world who use IE (Yan says it’s around 55% now) cannot visit my blog without having to deal with some fairly obvious design flaws, issues that are not all that serious but may yet affect readability. This then got me thinking about the small minority of global disabled internet users who probably face similar ‘compatibility’ issues all the time, whether it’s font size, color schemes, frame location, or something else that might make viewing a given website particularly difficult.
It suddenly seemed really, really unfair that this population of human beings, often the least-recognized or publicly accommadated minority in the world, couldn’t peruse the web with the same degree of care-free whimsy that I enjoy on a near daily basis. It’s just wrong, really. Everyone should have the privilege of reading my crappy writing, damnit!
Seriously, I am a little embarrassed that despite my technological (Web 2.0) interests over the years, in conjunction with my progressive political efforts, that I have not been more conscious about disability access until now. In order to remedy this, then, I will be working towards redesigning my website, both the blog and the vlog. I am therefore collecting URLs to code and design resources for making websites more accessible. Currently my focus is on WordPress themes, and here’s what I’ve found so far:
I’ll post more information as my research progresses. Hopefully, time permitting, a new version of my website will be up an running within the next few months.
