I’ve made a number of accessibility fixes to this site, following the distressing discovery that it was impossible to tab through the dropdown menu. This rendered the menu useless to keyboard users (which includes screenreader users). Ack! I quickly found a far better keyboard accessible menu that also uses much simpler CSS. The previous menu was needlessly complex and a nightmare to adjust. I should have done this ages ago.
Fixing the menu led me to investigating just how accessible my site really is, and I found a lot of things to fix. The web site WebAIM: Web Accessibility In Mind was tremendously helpful. I’m still working on improving overall accessibility, but here’s what I’ve done so far.
- Improved the accessibility of my e-mail address on the Author page by making it copy-able
- Added an improved “Skip to Content” link that appears on tabbing, and a visible “Skip to Sidebar” link, for keyboard users.
- Installed a script to fix the terrible Internet Explorer keyboard focus bug affecting same-page links. Wow. I thought I knew all the IE bugs, but this is a new one, and I’m astounded that Microsoft still hasn’t fixed it in IE 8. It breaks basic keyboard navigation. There is a fix at Juicy Studio: Keyboard Navigation and Internet Explorer – or see the javascript include file used on my site (located in the site header, wrapped in some conditional commenting for IE).
- Bolded links or added underlines. I prefer no underlines for visual reasons, but relying on colour alone to distinguish links is a problem for colorblindness.
- Removed the “WP Ajax Edit Comments” plugin which allowed you to edit your comments after entering them. It couldn’t be navigated using the keyboard (darn AJAX developers). I need a replacement for this because I love the functionality.
- Removed the tabindex settings from the comment form in WordPress. This fixed most of the tab order problems in the comments. I hope WordPress fixes this in the new default theme for WordPress 3.0.
- Rewrote link text for many links so they could be understood out of context (for screenreaders). This is ongoing! Blogs and LiveJournal/Dreamwidth have taught me bad lessons! *grin*
Still to be fixed
The image gallery. That uses a different code base.
What I couldn’t fix
The Preview function on blog comments will continue to cause confusion for users of screen readers, and keyboard navigation users in general, as the keyboard focus jumps up to your name instead of taking you to the Post button. In addition, the “Reply” button is confusing when it appears in previewed comments because one assumes that pressing “Reply” will finalize the comment, when it actually does nothing. This button ought to be labelled “Reply to this Comment” and should not appear in previewed comments. I can’t change this without hacking the WordPress core. Another thing I hope is fixed in the release of WordPress 3.0 next month.