Photo by Mikhail Hilov on Unsplash.com
This week’s class on digital accessibility was surprising and informative. Throughout the class, I continued to realize the amount of online sites that are inaccessible to many individuals. When I think of accessibility, the first thing that comes to my mind is architecture and other structural components of communities, like brail signage, crosswalk signals, and elevators. However, these key components to daily life do not near the complex world of digital accessibility.
Aspects of digital accessibility are often forgotten or missed while developing databases, websites, and resources. I believe this is because of the lack of confrontation that is involved with the online world. While looking at physical accessibility, it is impossible to avoid the interactions with disabled individuals, making it a more urgent focus. However, there is no pressure on authors and publishers to ensure all sites or databases are accessible to everyone. There is also much more focus on the security and risks of online content being leaked, manipulated, or effected by online viruses, which can often interfere with making documents and domains accessible. I found this concept quite surprising. As creators focalize on these points, accessibility is often completely forgotten or extremely inconvenient to navigate.
I found the Wave Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool to be an incredibly useful site to ensure the accessibility of your website. I was very surprised by the results I received for my blog regarding the colour contrast. While viewing my blog, I would not assume that it would be considered inaccessible to many individuals. While designing it in the first few weeks of class, I only considered the easthetics of it. This included the colours, fonts, and layout. Since my chosen cover photo consists of blues and whites, I focused the appearance of my blog to the colour blue. The overlapping shades of blue and grey can be difficult to see when individuals are visually challenged. Even after modifying my blog, The Wave Web tool still found countless aspects that reduced the level of accessibility. I also noticed that the majority of these aspects are related to the WordPress format provided, in which I am unable to edit any further. To analyze your own website with the Wave Web Evaluation Tool, click here.
Below is a video i created from a previous blog that I have now added closed captioning to in hopes of making it more accessible:
