Are Blind Users Able to Blog?
Blogging is growing in popularity, and the text-based medium provides easy access for those that rely on assistive technology. Feed readers and XML structured documents are providing open access to many publishing platforms. But are all blogs accessible? And how easy is it for low-vision users to start their own Blog?
The American Foundation for the Blind rated two blogging platforms and 4 popular blogs using JAWS screen reader and ALVA Braille display. The first step was rating the ability to download, install and set up two of the more popular blogging applications; Blogger and BlogLines.
As one can imagine, the ability to read a blog was significantly easier to accomplish. The setup and installation process of Blogger was stopped early with major accessibility problems, yet Bloglines had very minor issues.
Read the entire AFB Blog accessibility evaluation.
AFB’s guidelines for creating an accessible blog.
Having set-up and used a couple of blogging platforms, I can say that WordPress is one of the easier to set-up and run. I will leave the accessiblity experience for the set-up of WordPress for an upcoming post. However, I have to say that the semantic publishing platform and the standards-compliant programming were two of the main factors that influenced my choice.
