The Internet these days has grown (and is still growing) to becoming a necessity in most countries of the world.

Everyone, including people with different types of disabilities are on the net shopping, carrying out research, reading news and blogs day in day out.

Unfortunately, many of these disabled visitors have unique requirements to be able to access and comfortably read your content.

Have you heard about Maxwell Ivey, The Blind Blogger ?

Max has been one of my blogging friends and an impressive person who has developed his skills and is helping people worldwide. He’s an author, a life coach, an amusement equipment broker and a podcaster.

Unlike Max, many blind and disabled people need special tools built on your website for them to be able to consume your content.

A few months ago, while browsing Neil Patel’s blog, I found something intriguing:

That pushed me to go do some research and I found out Neil’s blog was actually accessible. What this means is that people with various disabilities can comfortably access his blog.

This got me really thinking and carrying out more research on Web Accessibility. I came up with two very important conclusions:

You could actually face lawsuit if your blog is not accessible. For your blog to be accessible, it has to be in compliance with the WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ), ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), Section 508 and other worldwide legislation. There is a massive number of people worldwide with disabilities. According to WHO in this report, hundreds of millions of people live with blindness. This means an accessible website may experience an interesting amount of increase in website audience.

But Web accessibility is difficult and expensive

I found out that, though making your blog and other websites accessible is gradually becoming a requirement, it’s also very difficult (from a technical point of view) and super expensive.

This means web accessibility is a thing for big organisations and Governments. But these bodies won’t produce content for all disabled people. So there is absolute need for a more affordable and easy to implement accessibility solutions.

Neil uses an AI-Powered web accessibility solution called AccessiBe which is quite affordable and easy to implement. This ended my research. I thought if Neil goes with it, it must be a good solution, so I’m giving it a try.

Note that I’m not in anyway part of the project. As long as it helps my readers, I think it’s worth mentioning.

You may want to read more about it on my blog here and try out this free WP accessibility plugin for WordPress users

4 Tips to improve your blog’s accessibility without a tool

By implementing an AI tool or plugin, there will be a massive improvement involving your theme in general. However, here are some simple tips to make sure your blog posts’s accessibility is ameliorated.

1. Describe your images

For images on your blog posts to be accessible, you need to add a reasonable alternative text (alt text). This is actually very simple to do for WordPress users. If your blogging tool isn’t WP, you need to figure out how to add the alt text to your images.

The reason this is important is because accessibility devices like screen-readers for the blind will read out the text, helping them to gain an understanding of the image. The text you add to your image should be descriptive enough too to help the reader understand what it’s all about.

2. Make your link anchor text meaningful and relevant

When linking to an internal or external resource, I recommend you use relevant text in your hyperlinks. Screen-readers ‘link-hop’ Generic anchor text like “Click here” may not really help the reader understand what to expect on the next page.

3. Have links open in the same window

We have generally been told that links should be opened in new Window or new tab. The reason is to try to keep the user on the current page. We think that opening the linked page on the current window, we may lose the reader, especially if the link is pointing to a different domain.

While these reasons may be making some sense, opening the page in a new window may make things confusing for readers with vision-impairment who require a screen-reader to navigate around the internet.

4. Use headings correctly

While headings are used to format your web document and give it some search engine relevance, they help readers with an understanding of the logical page structure.

On the web, your headings are defined with the <h1> to <h6> html tags. While the most important headings are defined with the <h1> tag, the least are defined with the <h6> tag.

Disabled visitors using screen-readers will find web documents with proper headline formatting more accessible and easy to read.

I hope this post helps you with useful materials to make your blog and website accessible. Kindly share it on social media so the information gets to your friends as well