Adapting Blogs

Hello, I hope you are well, today I would like to talk about the importance of adapting your blogs to meet your reader's needs. Recently, I have been adapting my blog to make it easier for people who have visual impairments. I didn't know how to adapt a blog to help people who have visual impairments because I didn't know very much about 'Alt Text' before I saw a YouTube video by another blogger named Sassy (link at the end of post), in her video, she explains what 'Alt Text' is. 'Alt Text' stands for 'Alternative Text', which Is used for describing images and other visual items and can be read aloud by screen readers. Why is it important? 'Alt Text' can give readers who are visually impaired the ability to know what's in images, and the better the image description, the more they know about the image.

Now, I try to remember to add 'Alt Text' to every image that I upload to my blog and my Twitter. Giving your pictures descriptions can really help people determine what is in your images if they can't physically see them. For example; the picture below is a sandy beach. If you hover over the picture, you will get a detailed description for the picture. The image description is written by the author of the post.

If I am completely honest, before I watched Sassy's YouTube video, I didn't really know what 'Alt Text' was used for. I thought that it was just to name the image that you upload. I guess you never stop learning! I'm glad I know what 'Alt Text' is for now because I can make Brains on Wheels more accessible by adding descriptions to my images. I have also started doing this on Twitter as well.

Now that I know what 'Alt Text' is, I will be adding it to every image I post, I will also add it to images on my Social Media too. I'm not entirely sure if Instagram and Pintererst have the ability to enable you to add Alt Text, and I don't think Facebook does either, but you'll have to have a fiddle. Let me know if you discover how to do it.

Another thing that I have changed about my blog is that I have changed the design of the blog posts to include labels on the "Like" and share buttons. I have discovered that screen readers do not read out the text that appears when you hover over the buttons.

One more thing that I have done to make my blog easier to use is that I have written what each of the share buttons do at the right hand side of the blog posts. This is to try and make it easier for people who use screen readers to share my content. I did try to write labels underneath the share buttons, but I then realise that it wouldn't work; I was hoping the text would move depending on the length of the blog post, but it doesn't, which is a pain. I hope this makes it easier for people to navigate around my blog.

Take care.

Watch Sassy's video on YouTube, click on the link to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYnC4uwjs9c&feature=youtu.be