First, thank you for this bit on audience and accessibility and for Nickie's link. I clicked over and read it, and there are a bunch of things there I need to look into.

Second, please Andrea - are you reading my syllabus? I teach comm. college Freshman Comp, and on the day I assigned the Abstract Concept paper (take an abstract concept, like, oh HAPPINESS, and tell a definition or manifestation of it using concrete examples, etc.) you posted on Happiness.

Tonight I'm going in to talk about what? Audience, and how they're not considering their audience when they're writing. They are struggling with it a lot this semester mostly because they don't care about audience. (Buncha punks.) I've been struggling with how to explain the importance of audience and now I feel reinvigorated. Thank you.

Well, now that you ask--yes! I have been spying on all my readers through super-secret software that especially focuses on syllabi. Now you know. ;)

Kudos to you for getting this done and up so fast! *impressed look* (And, as always, especially for bringing awarenesss to the issues.)

A couple of notes. I don't want people thinking that the ONLY way to make their site accessible is by putting their sidebar on the right hand side. (Or that all sites with a left sidebar are unaccessible) My blog has sidebars on right and left sides but a text reader still sees the middle column (content) first. There are other easy workarounds too.

I haven't looked at your CSS. But a quick and dirty way to look at whether or not your font sizes are "relative" is to view your site in Firefox (I think Mozilla, Netscape and Opera operate the same way too, but I'm too time crunched to try it.) When you load the page in Firefox, use CTRL - to make text smaller or CTRL + to make text larger and CTRL 0 to return to default size. Any text that you have in your page that doesn't adjust in size is not "relative" and should be addressed.

I haven't worked through all 30 days yet. If I've anything else useful to say, I'll let you know!

Again, great job!

This week I'm editing the report we're finally finishing on our study of the accessibility of community college web pages and online applications, so this is timely for me!

The latest word on alt text actually is to insert a blank space for images that are only for decoration or visual markup. You don't want to make people listen through "spacer spacer spacer horizontal line spacer spacer spacer decorative image spacer."

I'd forgotten about the language tag, LOL. When checking my own page I checked my image properties for alt text. I use a plugin that links from my photo album to my blog, and it does insert alt text (the name of the picture) but because the programmer is german, it says the language for the pictures is german! Not sure how to change that...

Impressive work!

Btw, I'm loving your new site design-- clean, readable, and really quite elegant!

You always make me think, Andrea.

Thanks for the link today.

Miche, good point. YOu're right. Alas, being a css hack, I confess that I didn't understand any of the other methods of working with sidebars and presentation, so I just moved the damn thing. And WOW, thanks for the ctrl tip, it worked! So is that one thing I don't have to worry about? Or are IE users still screwed? I guess I'll have to mess around and find out.

Sara--LOL True. I did actually put blank alt tags for most of them; I described the one in the post, though, just because I talked about it in the post. Though if that's not the thing to do, please tell me!

Thanks, Sandra.

Admit it, Julia: You hate it.

You know, you could tell a story with your alt tags, esp. those that appear in lists of links. That would be a neat trick. So say all the images in your nav bar could go like this:

alt="once upon a time there was"
alt="a woman named Andrea who"

Nice treat for readers who see alt tags!

Andrea -

First off, thanks for linking my blog. I appreciate it.

Secondly, I read that article on Flooded Lizard Kingdom and promptly printed it out. As a fledgling blog-builder and Master of my Own Domain, it's nice to have someone actually provide a clue as to how to make a site easier to navigate.

Thirdly, I'm buying a lockpick. ;)

Andrea, the CTRL thing I mentioned in most other browsers is a handy thing for seeing if your site has "relative" fonts and good for users who quickly need to make things bigger or smaller (as I sometimes do when my eyes get tired). IE users can acheive the same sort of thing, I think by going into Tools | Internet Options | Accessbility will get you to a place where you can over-ride CSS colours and font sizes and from the operating system itself, many folks with accessibility issues can choose a larger "standard" font than the one that comes with the vanilla install. So you see, there's really no way to know how someone views your website!

For what it's worth, my friend who uses a text reader says that the single biggest thing a blogger can do to make a blog accessible is to publish full entries to RSS.

Elizabeth--excellent. Thank you. I'm all set then .... I know that can open one up to piracy, but I think it's worth it, for myself.

Miche, no kidding. I visited hte links from DIA for how colour-blind users will see a site, and it was eye-opening, if migraine-inducing.

Jennifer, I never even thought of that. Very creative. I shouldn't be surprised.

Kerri, ha! Let me know if you find one that works.

The links on colorblindness were especially interesing to me, too, because in all likelihood my son has a form of anomalous color vision --not the true red/green "blindness" but a difference in the rods that percieve red that cause the entire spectrum to be shifted away from what most of the rest of us see. I'm always interested in simulators that might give me some idea of how the world appears to him.

It's made me much more aware of the use of color to convey information.

I actually sent the link to several of the outreach people I work with. One of them is doing training on IT accessibility around the country right now and is always looking for things to illustrate the points she's trying to get across, so THANKS for posting the DIA link, because it led me to some cool new resources :)

Doh! Where the h3ll is my brain? In IE, go to the View menu and select Text Size!

Can I only chime in to say whatever you're doing, and however it's making you feel, it's just showing up as looking and reading clean, fresh and focused? That I am just feeling good energy since your change-over?

Thanks for the heads-up on this, Andrea! I'll see if I can make my out-of-the box blog more accessible over Winter Break. Unfortunately, I won't have time before then.

Andrea, I love you.

If I had a dollar for every variation on "tard" that yet another "all about me" virtual jackass has so cleverly used in lieu of a comment button, I would be a rich woman. A rich bitter woman, but at least then I would surf through blogland from the lap of luxury and smash only the best of dishes with utter disgust as I encountered YET ANOTHER blogger attempting to run with the cool kids by demonstrating her "hippest" lingo.

My favorites are the feminista blogs...nothin' like reading "Bring it on tards!" on a blog dedicated to women's rights...I guess excepting the right I thought I had to not have my daughter's developmental delays cruelly and proudly mocked; excepting my daughter's rights to equality because her disability disqualifies her from her womanhood. What was I thinking anyway? She is all of 2 years old...time for us to "get ovver it" already.

Okay, I am a bit crabby right now (just received some very not so good news) and looking for a target, but wowza, those a-holes are just asking for it.

Love you though! And the rest of your post. And the new blog-ona.

This is just another area where I have been unaware of my own privilege - thanks for the awareness. I'm hoping to get my blog redesigned soon (my christmas present to myself) so I'm excited to make it more accessible.

Also, thanks for stopping by. It made my day!

Sara, you're welcome.

Miche, uh oh. It didn't work. I guess I still have to figure out the relative text sizes thing. *sigh*

Thanks to the com(pli)menters, too.

Emily, I love you. Exactly. And I"m sorry to hear that you got some bad news. I know you haven't had the time/energy for blog updates lately, but if you ever want to email I'd love to hear from you.

Wow, I didn't know that about the Alt tags and readers. I have been meaning to put in Alt tags anyway; now I'll have to make it more of a priority.

You rock. Great post. Just found your site from MOM-NOS's recent post.

I'm so thrilled to see this post! Thank you