Being A Responsible Blogger

I’ve learned so much in my decade of blogging: from how to select a theme, to what a widgets, to how to embed code.  I love all of the things I’ve figured out and how easy blogging has become over the years.

Something not a lot of people consider is accessibility.  I’ve learned a lot about the limits of accessibility and how important it is so that everyone can access what you’re putting out there.  In my position in technology, I have to be sure our school websites are accessible.  You’d be surprised how much still in inaccessible to people with disabilities even with all of the amazing technology we have.  Yes, there are screen readers and text to speech, but as far as we’ve come with these technologies, they are not always fabulous and in so many cases, they are laborious and tedious.

As a blogger, one thing you can do is alt text to your pictures.  This allows a screen reader to explain the pictures when hovered over.  It will say whatever you type, so be clear in what you write.  You might have noticed this on Instagram lately.  I see a lot of auto captioning now in videos and it’s because people are choosing to allow it to auto caption so people can read or be read to.  Again, it’s not perfect and mistakes abound but it’s a step in the right direction.  

I know this will astound you, but I use plain on Blogger for this amazing blog.  When I add a picture, I get this:

I simply type a brief statement about what is in the picture and when touched or hovered over, the text will appear or be read aloud.  It isnt perfect, but it’s something that takes an extra minute that you can do to help those who don’t have the same access that you might  have.