I generally go from my experience... I really should design some kind of checklist that covers the basics in a *basic* way... a lot of shit winds up being pretty technical.welch wrote:That would be a really cool idea. In fact, if you know of a good, easy to follow checklist for people who want to be sure existing stuff is "accessibility good", links would be quite welcome.rayshul wrote:If you're setting up the site I can help with identifying accessibility issues/putting together basic accessibility guidelines for bloggers.
Linkwise, a good spot is here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/RC/tools/complete - you'll get automated web accessibility checkers. These are good for checking code and ensuring you haven't fucked up anything there... but I'd probably recommend you go through pages manually to check that what the report is telling you is actually correct. (Most accessibility experts I've met seem to agree that a lot of the time you have to do it the fucky way.) For instance it might say you haven't labelled an image... but the image in question is something dumbass that doesn't need to be labelled or have alt text, or pick up on a colour contrast within an image... or fail to with an overlay.
Colour wise my favourite tool has been the colour contrast tool from Vision Australia: http://www.visionaustralia.org/business ... -web-pages - it's more hands on than most things that just check and leave you a list of shit that is wrong. You can also purchase different types of glasses from Vision Australia - and presumably other organisations that look at vision areas - if you're really keen which will replicate the experiences people with vision problems have so you can test the site. So there's my major recommendation, it's good for choosing the colour scheme as well while designing.
A good rule of thumb for any bloggers is to think about the two common problems that fuck people using the web - being vision impaired or having arthritis or another condition that makes it difficult to use a mouse. Labelling everything with logical shit people need to know ("This graph shows the disitribution of X in this situation. Features of this graph include... blurghy blurgh" as opposed to "GRAPH OF X.") and to ensure links are descriptive is a good first step. And if in doubt, use alt text. For people with mobility issues make sure you don't have any keyboard traps (try tabbing about the page and making sure you can get to every link IN A LOGICAL ORDER) and that you have a skip nav option so people can jump straight to the text rather than blurging through the top links every time. Captioning for videos and/or transcripts is the main concern for those with hearing impairments.
Depending on your target/location you may or may not have to worry about technology limitations and things like broadband speed - for example making sure you don't need javascript turned on, and that your pages still work with page styles turned off (as much as possible). Keeping things focussed on content and not on big whizzy shit (unless you absolutely need to) is best. There's a lot of speedtest things as well that can help you organise what's loaded to your website to keep the load-time down so people don't leave the site before it loads. There is a HUGEEEEE improvement to site stats and visits just by lowering your site load time by a few seconds. Unbelievable shit... it's hugely important... so make sure the improtant content loads before the big images and backgrounds and other shit your designers felt was TOTES NECESSARY.
There's also http://webtoolkit DOT govt.nz/ if you're interested in a government perspective on what is the baseline for compliance - it looks to get WCAG 2.0 AA standard. Obvs getting to AAA is ideal, but it's sometimes not possible.
The bottom line of it all is that if people can't access your site quickly and efficiently, they'll leave, and you won't see them again. They won't even remember anything about your site because they probaly didn't GET anything from your site. So without basic accessibility you're just fucking yourself over.
Well that was a llot of blah.