For those of you unfamiliar with alt tags, alternative tags are added to the code that places an image on the web page. They are used to describe the image to someone who is blind and uses screen reader software to read the web page to them. They can also be used to add key words for search engine optimization. They don’t show on the page unless the image is not there for some reason, for example, an email before the recipient chooses to download the images. Adding alternative tags to images is a very basic and one of the easiest ways to improve accessibility to your site, but just what those alt tags should say is one of the more complicated things. I have been reading the accessibility guidelines that are spelled out on the webaim.org even that information is conflicted. Read More »

Recently I was able to see how a blind person uses JAWS the most popular screen reader. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this technology, screen readers are software that read the content of a web page to the user. A person could use it to read the page from top to bottom and identify any links in the content as it goes. However, this is clunky and slow. Imagine how frustrating it would be to not be able to scan a page to look for the links you want, but to have to go through the content piece by piece, in order, from top to bottom Read More »