Well, I did my accessibility audit. My domain is doing good, with that 95%… success rate? I passed all 20 main audits and there are three mysterious manual audits that I need to pay $29.99 for to unlock. So I’ll pass.
No, wait! That was the sketch, Google-sourced, website accessibility checker. I went to the official, Vivero-sanctioned, accessibility checker and my website is falling apart. Structural problems with my “fully-justified text”, 5 alerts, a handful of contrast errors. This was eye-opening. I am learning lots on how to address these concerns.
As part of this reflection, I watched a few Accessibility Perspectives videos (from the Web Accessibility Institute) and then read through the “WCAG 2 A and AA Checklist“, WCAG standing for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Elementor, the WordPress plug-in to add a few more buttons to the website making process (in the name of visuals and drag and drop!) offers an alt text option for images. I went ahead and added some description for my professional headshot. I also read the guide on how to write alt-text for images. They’ve made a nice decision tree to present when and how to use alt-text.
One feature that I hadn’t considered before was making websites mouse-less friendly. Cursor-less? What I mean is creating a website that can be navigated using only your keyboard.
Finally, I also thought about content-inherent design features that may impact accessibility. This might be writing clearly and without crazy jargon, or maybe describing your hyperlinks with link text, as opposed to something like “click me…”.
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