Notice anything different? And no, I didn’t get a haircut (although I desperately need one). Okay, fine, I’ll tell you… Look how accessible it is in here! I have dedicated some of my time to make sure that I Wear Your Grandad’s Clothes is a website for everyone, and that no group or individual is left unable to consume the content that I am putting out. To some of my readers who do not require any additional assistance when scrolling the web, it might look like much, but I hope that those who do are pleased with the changes I have implemented into the site! Let’s take a look at what’s new:
- Accessibility Toolbar:
Thanks to a handy dandy plug-in called One Click Accessibility, you can now find a pretty, orange button on the left hand side of the site which opens the accessibility toolbar. I got the inspiration to add this feature way back when I did my first peer review on Midnight Stories, who had the same toolbar on their site. Some of the toolbar’s features include: the ability to increase or decrease text size, underline links, change text into an easier-to-read font, and options to change the site’s colours to grayscale, high contrast, negative contrast, and light background.
- Alt Text:
Although it is not written out immediately under the image, I have written out alt text for every image that is displayed on iwearyourgrandadsclothes.com. The alt text can be accessed by either using a screen reader through your browser, or if you right-click while hovering your cursor over the image then select “inspect,” you can find the description within the HTML after the tag “alt=”. This was my first time writing alt text for images, so hopefully I did alright!
- Text-To-Speech:
Even though many who depend on text-to-speech features likely have one already installed onto their computer, I have also provided a button on my blog posts that will provide text-to-speech that can be found at the bottom left-hand side of the post.. I used the plug-in called ResponsiveVoice, which is a little bit slow and has a janky Australian accent, but it definitely does the job. I’m sure there are better text-to-speech Chrome extensions or something like that, but I figured I’d offer one just in case.
- WP Accessibility Plug-In:
I installed the plug-in called WP Accessibility, which searches over my entire domain and corrects/suggests corrections to my site to make it more accessible. Some of the services that it provides for me are: pointing out images that need alt text, preventing links from opening in new windows, and adding outlines to elements in keyboard focus.
I am definitely still learning and working to better my site and become as accessible and inclusive as I can be, so please feel free to comment below any suggestions you have to make iwearyourgrandadsclothes.com even more easily usable.
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