Adding Accessibility

I’m up to Day 26 of Mark Pil­grim’s excel­lent series on access­ib­il­ity. For­tu­nately, the Word­Press tem­plates are mostly com­pli­ant out of the box so I had very little to change.

Just to check, I decided to run the main web­log page through an access­ib­il­ity val­id­at­or. There was one advert­ised via Google on Mark’s site, so I clicked on it, gave them a val­id-but-not-my-main email address, and waited. For a report that said things like “You’ve used stylesheets. Make sure the site works without stylesheets.” I guess they want to sell their con­sult­ing ser­vices on how to make your site access­ible. Giv­en the qual­ity of the tool, I’m not sure I’d trust their judge­ment. Bobby works much bet­ter, and does­n’t try to sell you con­sult­ing. It shows you what the page looks like without a stylesheet, for example.

This web­log is cur­rently almost WAI AA com­pli­ant; I just have to fig­ure out how to make the (more…) text on the front page con­tain dif­fer­ent text for each link it points to. Which means learn­ing a little more PHP and Word­Press tem­plate syntax. 

And then I’ll tackle Days 26–30 of Mark’s series.