Accessibility in Blogging

 For our final blog post we were tasked with looking at accessibility through the lens of our blogging experience. Accessibility is an area I didn't have much experience with prior to this class, and really am only beginning to understand how large of a topic it truly is. A quick Google search for the definition of accessibility returns:

• The quality of being able to be reached or entered
• The quality of being easy to obtain or use
• The quality of being easily understood or appreciated
• The quality of being easily reached, entered, or used by people who have a disability

In all of these definitions the key section is the word: quality. Accessibility is a quality of our media, and concerns the idea of our media being easy to reach, use, understand, and accommodate a variety of people with different needs. As a content creator, these are vital parts of our success as if we fail on any of them we cannot reach the highest volume of consumers to interact with our product. 

When I was thinking about how to add accessibility as a quality to a blog post I thought about the Kano Model from Six Sigma. The Kano Model divides features into three parts: Musts, Wants, and Delighters. Musts are features that when done incorrectly actively cause dissatisfaction. Wants are your baseline, the basic level of the feature that a customer expects. Delighters are the features that excite your customers, the WOW factor that is above and beyond meeting their basic and performance needs. 

Craigwbrown, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I knew I wanted to find where accessibility qualities fell on this framework. WebAIM described what I was looking for perfectly:

Often, these strategies promote overall usability, beyond people with disabilities. Everyone benefits from helpful illustrations, logically-organized content and intuitive navigation. Similarly, while users with disabilities need captions and transcripts, the can be helpful to anyone who uses multimedia in silent or noisy environments.

 

 This description points to a good starting point: functional improvements. These would fall solidly into the space between performance needs, wants, and delighters. More of them would only add to the general quality of the media, while delighting those people that are now able to interact with the media because of those improvements. 

So what are some simple ways to begin? 

The Web Accessibility Initiative has a several pages of evaluations tools, but the natural place to begin is the their Easy Checks page. It's quite surprising how simple some of their suggestions are. Ensuring page titles are unique on your website and are brief and purposeful seems like common sense, but can help people with cognitive disabilities to understand a webpage better. Other simple things include ensuring your text zooms correctly so when someone needs to resize the text it doesn't become a jumble. One that surprised me greatly was keyboard access. I always assumed that keyboard access was a basic thing and I was just mouse dependent and never looked for it, but little things like having the dropdown lists work with arrows and having tabs move logically are important considerations.

  

Introduction to web accessibility. WebAIM. (n.d.). Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://webaim.org/intro/  

(WAI), W. C. W. A. I. (n.d.). Easy checks – a first review of web accessibility. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/