Blogging For All

I've been blogging for a few years now and I've seen some crazy things going on. But now, worryingly, I'm seeing the same crazy mistakes going on within the Book Blogging Community, which makes me so frustrated. We should be helping each other, not blocking each other. 


Here are a few small changes you can make to your existing blog, or things to consider when making a new blog. 


1. Colour Schemes:
This is such an obvious thing and I'm surprised to see it go so wrong so many times. Keep it simple and comfortable to read. Don't clutter it up with needless graphics, gifs, banners etc. Especially in the Book Blogging Community, it's the written posts we come for. Your blog is not a book cover crying for attention from millions around it on a shelf. Yes, have your own identity, Yes have your own style. But the whole purpose of your blog is to express your opinion on the books you love, so make it easy for people to find your posts, links and actually stay for the entire review without our eyes watering. 


White on Black or Black on White work the best. If you have to have to use a colour scheme, choose wisely, avoid Yellow/Blue and Green/Red then you won't upset the large Visually Impaired community that actually want to read your blogs and you'll also get more colour blind readers and older readers choosing to stick around too! 


2. Text
Flexible text is the way to go, it makes it easier for Visually Impaired people to have control over how big they need the text to be. If your themes have fixed font faces and sizes it's just another source of frustration, leading to a drop in readership. Choose highly contrasting colours. If you use a dark background, make your font as light as you can and visa versa. 


Spellcheck, Spellcheck, Spellcheck. I'm always letting typo's slip through the net which is why I often ask my mum or a friend to proofread before final posting. Screen readers don't understand abbreviations or incorrectly spelt words. So to stop confusion in its tracks, spellcheck before hitting that publish button! and avoid using abbreviations when possible. 


3. Placement
Screen readers read from the top left to the bottom right of the screen so having all your links on the left is really irritating. Each time we visit the same links are repeated. Best to keep it on the right hand side, that way if we want to go through the links we can choose to go over there. 


4. Images
Being a book blogger myself, I know how important it is to have the cover of the book somewhere in the post, it draws positive attention. Something you can do to make your book blog that is littered with images more VI friendly, is to always provide a caption and description. That way the screen reader doesn't just announce that there is an image but what the actual image is of. 


5. Links
Everyone knows links are important, not just for navigating the blog, but to other sites as well. It's very disorientating when you click a link and it suddenly opens a new window and we weren't expecting it, some older screen readers don't even announce that a separate window has been opened which is even more disorientating! The newer ones do but please, don't have links opening in new windows, or if you do, please specify in the post that this will happen. e.g. The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab is available on Amazon, click here to read the blurb. Avoid 'read more..' links. These may look great and professional but.. screen readers that skip find them very tricky and unhelpful. 


6. Comment Verification
Please, please, take off word verification. Yes, I know with all the spam and stuff it's temping to keep it on but by doing so you are putting off a lot of readers. I'm Visually Impaired and I can never see what the heck the words and letters/numbers are, and I've never once experienced a time when choosing the listen to words option has actually provided me with an intelligible noise I can deduce information from. Turn it off and boom, accessible to VI readers! 


7. Accurate Labelling
We all love widgets, they are a fun thing to add to any blog but what a lot of us forget is to label them. It's cute to have 'Awesome Peeps' above a gallery of followers but when coming from a screen reader, we have no idea what you are talking about, it could be a post, it could be a single photo, what is it? it's not a list... Blogroll, blog roll of what? my haunts online, book blogs I love to read, My to be read list?


So that's just the basics of what makes a blog work or not work for me and why I either stick around to read it or not. Making your book blog accessible to a whole new world of VI readers won't just help boost your blog readership, it will also show the rest of the internet that VI people are very much apart of the community and that we're nerdy about technology too. It's also great to take a step back and think about other people who are reading or want to read your blog but have obstacles. Things are taken for granted and every now and then we need a nudge in the right direction to keep everything fun for everyone. 


Thanks for reading. I hope this helped.