How User Friendly Are Your Blog Posts?
What would you do if you walked into a library and then someone put a blindfold on you and told you to go and find a piece of information? How would you cope? How long would you spend looking or more importantly, what if the very book you eventually found had the very page with the vital piece of information on that you wanted torn out?
Has it occurred to the majority of you that your blog posts may be exactly like this to someone who is vision impaired and has no sight to see pictures on the computer screen?
How much does an illustration on a blog post help you absorb the information you are looking for? Certainly for me and for other blind people, pictures are massive. Believe it or not, a lot of us are visual learners i.e. they learn best when presented with an pictorial representation of a concept. When I was sitting my final exams for my Psychology degree, I must have gone over the reading process word for word 10s of times but I couldn't for the life of me get the process into my head. So, I had a sighted peer describe the flow chart to me and bingo! I had it first time.
If you think back to the first 10 lessons from Wa, Kyle talks about how important it is to put Alt Tags with your images as, when our screen reading software comes across them, they are read out to us. Some of you might be under the misguided impression that because we can't see it, we wouldn't understand it and i know this to be the case from my psychology thesis but in fact, we, as blind people are surrounded by visual stimulae all our lives. We know, for example, that in the UK, postboxes are red, Grass is green and that the sun is yellow. Whether it means anything to us or not, it's just a fact and so, visual clues are vitally important to us.
As a group, the internet is vitally important to us for all sorts of reasons. It has opened so many doors, allowed people like me to attempt to earn money on my own terms, allowed me to look up recipes for otherwise inaccessible printed recipe books and even enabled me to re-kindle a friendship with my now husband. blind people more than most rely so much on the internet for information and even for shopping so don't bar them from getting the most from your website and possibly seeing you as an expert in your niche by putting up pictures without their descriptions.
I came across a blog post on here the other day and on the very strength of how excellent the descriptions were in that post, I followed the author. The alt tags may not be correct but they took the time to describe what was going on in the pictures and actually, for me that was just as good.
If you want to see a great example of a blog post which is totally accessible to those with a vision impairment, go here.
Recent Comments
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Kerry, I looked at the link you posted to the keyword training and it was great! Thank you for explaining this and posting the link.
You are very welcome. If it helps educate and gives people like me a chance to get more out of a blog post then I've done my job :-)
very nice post and good to remember that many people out there are blind and do use a different way of reading the posts
Thanks for enlightening us on this! I will definitely use this piece of advice when building my site.
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As always I have learnt something from one of the many blogs in this community. Frequently what I learn is useful in many ways, just as your point is useful in that it highlights something that many of us just do not consider.
Another job to add to my list.
Have followed you, thanx (thanks) for your help.