/Access all areas/ Sunny Man's Blog
15/03/2007 | Filed under Develop > Access all areas
As well as being good design practice, accessibility can also be a legal requirement. Nomensa’s Alastair Campbell examines blog.eop.org.uk
When Carl Mundy, known as Sunny Man, sent in his blog (blog.eop.org.uk) for an accessibility check, it was a great opportunity to assess a typical WordPress setup.
Something the Sunny Man’s blog has in common with the default WordPress theme is the fixed-width layout. I’ve covered this topic before, but it’s a little more difficult to deal with this time because there are some large, fixed-width images in the content. Although pages should be flexible to help those with mild to moderate visual impairments, at some stage the page layout will either collapse or overlap, neither of which is beneficial to anyone. For more information on elastic layouts, see www.alastairc.ac/2006/05/accessible-layouts.
The heading structure is generally quite good in a default WordPress installation, but unfortunately the Sunny Man’s blog has taken a step back in this regard. Where the Kubrick template uses a h1 for the site title, and h2 elements for posts and site tools, this blog has removed most of the headings, except the posts and some h5 elements within posts. If you use Firefox, you probably have the web developer extension installed. Try the ‘View Document outline’ function under ‘Information’ – the aim is for this to make sense in describing your page. In this case, I would wrap the header in a h1 (for the homepage only), each of the page areas in h2s (for example, ‘blog content’), and each post in a h3. For content pages, this would switch so that the post title (which represents the page content) would be a h1, and the header wouldn’t be a heading.
Something that Kubrick doesn’t quite get right is the label on the search, as there isn’t one. Even though the function may be visually obvious, every input should have a label, even if it’s hidden.
Another thing that I wish WordPress would include by default is a skip link. Although not in the toppriority accessibility checkpoints, these can be of great benefit to people using a keyboard (or equivalent) for access. There are about 30 links in the navigation to get through before the content, so a quick ‘skip to content’ link at the top would be very helpful.
Those are the main issues when looking at typical blog templates, but don’t forget that the content should be up to scratch as well.
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Comments
abs / 18/03/2007 / 19:26 / http://fr33stuff.blogspot.com/
Just checked out your blog it's pretty good.
Markus / 28/08/2007 / 18:35 / http://gutscheine.preistipp.eu
But he didn't optimized his blog template yet. Blogtitle is h1, date is h2 an the important thing, the title of the article is also still h3.
