The Big Blog Company : Extending accessibility options

Highlighting the facility to change font size extends the benefits of accessibility.

The Site

The Big Blog Company is a UK-based consultancy that helps commercial organisations take advantage of blogging. Its site is a good quality small business site, with one rare feature. The left-hand column has an ‘Accessibility’ panel allowing users to choose four styles in which to display the site. The default style is ’graphical small font’ – where the typeface is grey, green or blue and soft background colours are used to create a sophisticated look. The second button keeps the look and feel but increases the font size, while the other two offer either large or small typefaces, but in ‘high contrast’: that is, with lighter-coloured backgrounds and stronger colours.

The site does not, however, appear to follow basic accessibility guidelines. In particular, Alt-Text tags, used to describe pictures in words and which can be read by screen readers, are absent.

The Takeaway

While the seriously visually-impaired will know how to use accessibility options in their browsers to make websites as readable as possible, a huge number of people have some problems seeing, yet would not know how to make these adjustments. The biggest group is, of course, long-sighted middle-aged people who struggle on without using reading glasses.

The ability to change font size or contrast at a click is a boon to these people. Some large companies offer this facility, but it is impressive that a small company is doing it too. It is also a good way of broadcasting the message that the company is taking accessibility seriously. A shame, then, that screenreader users will be less impressed – omitting Alt-Text tags is a pretty basic error.

First published on 01 September, 2005