Today, I worked on the week 3 training about accessibility! One thing that was new to me was that the website’s capacity to be perceived and to be understood are two different sectors. One of the advice that I found helpful was “Use headings rather than bolding or font size change to indicate page sections,” as I did not have a clear understanding of the point of using the headings. Good to know that it increases accessibility!
I watched Web Accessibility Perspective Videos to learn more about what kind of barriers can exist on web pages. I found the video about keyboard compatibility and speech recognition particularly insightful in imagining the users’ perspective and navigations and building an easily navigable website.
I also read the Yale WCAG checklist. WordPress, fortunately, provides us with a function to create a toolbar that is uniform across the pages of the site, which enables consistent navigation. Thinking about the color of icons, letters, and backgrounds is a crucial part of design features that can be planned in the conceptual step of the website building. When implementing a link, for example, you might want to underline the link to emphasize that it is a link, not text, etc. Clarity is always the key!! I realized that I did not have a clear understanding of the role of alternative text until I learned it through those resources (I thought it was just there and chilling). I newly learned that the alternative text is crucial for the reader who uses a read-aloud function to understand the visual information which is not necessarily available for all people.
I am going to update my website using WAVE, and I hope it will improve the accessibility of my website!
