How to make sure your blog is accessible

As a blogger, you’ll want as many people as possible to be able to read what you have to say, so it’s crucial to make sure that your blog is accessible to all users, no matter what their abilities or limitations might be, or even where they’re accessing your blog from.

This can feel like a big job, especially when there are so many things to consider, but if you go through the task methodically and write down all the steps so you can tick them off, you’ll know you’ve done it right, and your website traffic will improve. With that in mind, here are some of the things to consider to make sure your blog is accessible.

Use an accessible website design

To get things started, it’s crucial to have an accessible website design right from the very beginning – with this basic element in place, it will be much easier for everything else to fall into place around it, but until you’ve cracked this part, you’ll be making things harder for yourself and the people you want to come to your website.

When you’re choosing your website design, look for responsive designs that can adapt to different screen sizes and devices, and make sure your website’s layout is clear and organized, with easy-to-navigate menus and consistent formatting all the way through; it’s little touches like that that make it all the more accessible.

Check the color contrast

Something else that can help is to get your color contrast right – it’s critical do to that because it will ensure anyone with color blindness or low vision can still use your website. In other words, you need to make sure that the background color contrasts well with any text on your site so everyone can read what you have to say.

Use a VPN

It’s not going to be easy to know whether or not people from different countries can access your site unless you happen to know a lot of people living overseas who you can ask to check it out for you. Since that’s not often the case, what are your options? One useful tool is a VPN, or virtual private network, which will allow you to change your location on iPhone to a variety of different countries. Once you’ve done that, you can check your site from each one, and make sure it works how you want it to. As a bonus, you can also check that your site works on a mobile screen, so that’s useful too.

Provide captions

If your blog includes multimedia content like videos or podcasts, it’s a good idea to make sure they’re accessible to anyone who visits your site, and to do that you can provide captions to help explain what’s happening in the video; these captions will be ideal for anyone who’s hard of hearing. When it comes to podcasts or audio content, you can provide the actual written transcript, so no one has to miss out.