Legal Marketing & PR

Is Your Law Blog Accessible to People With Disabilities?

By Amy Derby

When I recently attended SOBCon, a blogging and social media conference in Chicago, my favorite presentation was given by my friend Glenda Watson Hyatt on the topic of blog accessibility for people with disabilities. Her presentation, which she has made available as a free ebook titled How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Accessibility, addressed the reasons why it’s important for us to make sure everyone can access our blogs and provided ways to improve our blogs’ accessibility.

If you don’t know Glenda, she is known by many as The Left Thumb Blogger. Glenda has cerebral palsy and types (with one thumb) better than I do. She is also a published author and a sought-after speaker on the topic of web accessibility. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow her @GlendaWH.

Glenda’s presentation at SOBCon gave me a lot to think about, both for my own blogs and for my clients’ blogs. I want my own blogs to be as accessible as possible for everyone. And do I think it is important for a lawyer’s blog to be accessed by people with disabilities? Of course! People with disabilities are surfing the web for personal research, educational purposes, and yes — maybe even to hire you. 

One of the most easy-to-implement bits we learned from Glenda’s presentation:

Alt tags are important. When we post images or links on our blogs, people with visual impairments rely on the “alt” tag to know what the photo is of or what link they’re clicking on. When posting an image on WordPress blogs, the “title” field becomes the “alt” tag. Although some SEO-savvy bloggers use alt tags as an opportunity to get their keywords in an extra time, the intended use for this field is to enter a truly valid description so someone who can’t see the image or link can have it read to them by the technology they use to access the web. 

For example, in the image I posted above the alt tag is “How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Accessibility by Glenda Watson Hyatt.” This way, those who can’t see the image will know what the picture is of. Because this image is also a link to Glenda’s ebook, the alt tag also lets folks know what they’ll get when they click.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use alt tags, pages 14-20 of Glenda’s ebook explain in detail, with screenshots, how to use alt tags. I highly recommend reading the whole ebook; it’s a fast read and will provide you with ways to make your blog more accessible starting with your next post.

A quick perusal of my own blog after learning from Glenda gave me a lot to think about.

• Is my font size too small?
• Should I change my code so that links are also underlined?
• Why am I not captioning, where possible, the third-party videos I post? Or providing transcripts where captioning third-party videos isn’t possible? (I have a hearing loss myself and have trouble hearing most videos, so I should really have this done.)
• Can people find what they’re looking for without having to click around too much?
• Am I using tags in the best way? (Probably not!)

I am very interested in getting the legal community’s perspective on the issue of web/blog accessibility for people with disabilities. As a person with fairly decent eyesight and no physical disabilities keeping me from browsing/scrolling etc, I find a lot of the blogs I visit to be hard to read and difficult to navigate. Do you give much thought or concern to how people with disabilities might navigate your blog? Are there things about your blog you would change if you knew how?

Full post as published by Law Firm Blogger on June 08, 2009 (boomark / email).