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General accessibility tips for blog post authors

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Here are some general web accessibility principals that blog post authors can keep in mind to make their posts more accessible. These principles also apply to working with webpages in general. Blogging software and content management systems use similar WYSIWYG editors for updating the HTML content of a webpage.

Accessibility testing

Check your page with an accessibility checker like WAVE:

The WAVE tool is available as a browser extension for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox and will allow you to check your webpage for accessibility issues in one-click. The checker will show you exactly where the issues are in the code and provide advice on how to correct them.

Alt text

Add alternative text descriptions to your images:

Alternative text will describe the image to screen reader users and be seen by sighted users if the image can’t load. Focus on the meaning or purpose of the image rather than trying to describe every detail. See the Adding alternative text to images in a WordPress post for details of how to add alt text to an image in your Blog.

Headings

Use headings properly:

Be sure to separate your content into sections, especially in longer articles, and use headings correctly. In the editor, it may appear that headings are like font sizes, but they are more for structural usage. You shouldn’t pick a lower heading size because you like the font size of it. Headings need to be properly nested in a heading structure where you shouldn’t skip heading levels. For example, you shouldn’t go from an H1 to an H3. That H3 should be an H2 to be properly nested in the heading structure.
See WebAIM’s article about Semantic structure and headings for more information.

Use of color

Make sure all text has sufficient color contrast:

Small or regular-sized text should have a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 and large text (bold and 18px or higher or normal and 24px or higher) should have a contrast ratio of a least 3:1. You can use the WebAIM Contrast Checker tool or the Colour Contrast Analyzer tool to find the color contrast ratio. Also, make sure no content or visuals rely on color alone to communicate meaning. Use other ways to differentiate visuals to aid color-blind users.

Links

Make sure your hyperlinks are descriptive and not just ‘click here’ links:

Making link text more descriptive helps give context about where the link goes to. You could instead say, click here to learn more about (the subject…). Links should make sense out of context so if screen reader users land on them they will know where they go. Short phrases such as “click here,” “more,” “click for details,” are ambiguous when read out of context. Screen readers have key shortcuts that can jump between links in a page and using the tab key jumps between focusable objects like links & buttons. So, a screen reader user may not have read nearby text that would give a short ‘click here’ more context. You should include the context withing the link text itself.
See the Introduction to Links and Hypertext guidance from WebAIM for more information about writing descriptive hyperlinks.

Tables

Make sure you only use tables for tabular data:

Tables should only be used to show numerical data. They shouldn’t be used for layout like organizing out parts of the page into columns. In the late 1990s some designers used table-based layout which wasn’t an accessible practice and not responsive to smaller screens.

Make should your data tables have a header row specified:

Each label on a column should be a true header cell TH instead of a regular cell TD. In WordPress you can tell that something is a header cell clicking in the cell while editing the post. Below the table if it says ‘TH’ in the tage tree it’s a header cell. For example, the tag tree at the bottom of the editor might say: ‘TABLE > THEAD > TR > TH’. This is just above where it says: “Word count”.

Avoid using complex tables:

You should avoid using complex table because they can be challenging to make accessible and confusing to navigate for screen reader users. It may be better to convert a large complex table into two or more simple tables.
See WebAIM’s article about Creating Accessible Tables for more information.

 

Additional resources about blog post accessibility:

How writing evergreen content can extend the impact of your blog

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One way to work more efficiently and extend the impact of your blog is to create what’s known as ‘evergreen content’. This is content that isn’t tied to a specific date or month, writing about subjects that are more timeless. Keeping up with blog posting can be a challenge if every post is date specific. It can be a good strategy to mix in some evergreen posts that will have a longer shelf life. Then you get a longer benefit for your post writing efforts.

Another idea, similar to writing evergreen content, is to write seasonal content that can be reused year to year. You might create winter, spring, summer, and autumn content that isn’t tied to a specific year, making it more reusable. It can be more efficient to preplan and schedule posts once a month or once a quarter, than to be always be publishing ad hoc.

Managing a blog is like tending a garden. It’s best to do routine checks and maintenance every month to keep your blog healthy like doing periodic content audits and accessibility checks. ‘Link rot’ is something that happens over time where links become broken. As part of the blog’s monthly maintenance, content managers should go through their site and look for broken links. WordPress makes it easy to spot broken links by crossing them out with a strikethrough. Blog authors can look for strikethrough links each month and update the URLs that they point to. Links become broken in websites because the URLs of external webpages they link to change over time from organizations adjusting the structure of their websites.

If you run a blog with multiple authors, it’s likely that web accessibility errors will pop up over time. It would be a good practice to run periodic accessibility checks as part of the blog’s monthly maintenance plan. WAVE is a free tool that is good at finding accessibility issues in individual pages. To check a large blog or website, site scanning services like PopeTech can be used. Many organizations at Ohio State have access to scan their sites with PopeTech. For smaller blogs, authors may find it more convenient to install the WAVE browser extension which can check a page for issues in one click. Forming a plan to train authors about accessible content authoring can also help lower the number of accessibility issues that pop up over time. Ohio State offers several online courses about web accessibility through the Digital Accessibility Services office (DAS).

Resources:

Evergreen Content: What It Is, Why You Need It, & How to Create It by Si Quan Ong – Updated on May 8, 2019.

Evergreen Blog Posts: Content Ideas, Examples, and Tips by James Parsons – Updated Jan 4th, 2022

Link Rot: What It is and How to Deal with It by John Hughes – Updated on Jan 25, 2023

 

Adding alternative text to images in a WordPress post

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There is an alternative text field attached to images you upload to WordPress. This alt text provides a description of the image to people with visual impairments. We should strive to add descriptive alt text to all the images we upload to posts in WordPress. Missing alt text registers as an accessibility error in the WAVE scanner from WebAIM.

To add alt text to an existing image in WordPress.

  • Go to the Media.
  • Click on the image that you want to add alt text to.
  • Add some descriptive alt text about the image in the alternative text field.
  • Click anywhere and WordPress saves the field.
Opens in new window: An example of adding alt text to an image of an alarm clock in WordPress
Click above to view an example of adding alt text to an image of an alarm clock in WordPres.

To test if your alt text is really attached to the image you can run the post by the WAVE scanner or inspect the image code for an alt attribute. In some cases if the post code has been customized the alt text entered in the Media area might not appear in customized image markup.

Additional videos and resources about adding alternative text to images in a WordPress blog post:

A blog post accessibility & optimization checklist

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This checklist covers some major accessibility items to check when writing a high quality blog post.

Major areas to check:

Images

Do all of your images have alternative text descriptions?

Alternative text will describe the image to screen reader users and be seen by sighted users if the image can’t load.

See the Adding alternative text to images in a WordPress post for details of how to add alt text to an iamge in your Blog.

Have your images uploaded to your post been sized / optimized for the web?

Today’s digital cameras take high resolution photos with larger file sizes. But in a blog post you don’t need high res photos. You can work with your web developer or graphic designer to resize your images to an optimal size or use an application like Photoshop. Then the images will load faster for people on mobile connections and won’t eat up their data-plan bandwidth.

Headings

Are your headings structuraly nested correctly?
A post should have only one H1 heading at the top that is usually the same as the post title. The post title you enter in WordPress becomes the page’s H1. Be sure your H2 headings and H3 headings underneath them are nested properly. Never skip to a lower heading level without nesting it under a higher heading. In the past some designers have thought of heading levels as font sizes and skipped to a lower level because they like the font size of that level. Actually headings are semantic elements for creating a structural hierarchy in the page. This aids screen readers in navigating the page and has SEO (search engine optimization) benefits.

Colors and Typography

If you’ve added colors, do they have the right contrast?

For WCAG 2.1 level AA: have a 4.5:1 ratio for normal text and a 3:1 ratio for large text (bold and 18px or higher or normal and 24px or higher)

Use the WebAIM Contrast Checker tool or the Colour Contrast Analyzer tool.
The WCAG 2.1 guidelines related to color contrast is: 1.4.3

Are you using a standard font that’s easily readable?

You should use standard serif (Times Roman) or sanserif fonts (Arial or Helvetica) for maximum legibility. Novelty fonts with unusual letter-forms might be harder to read for people with low vision. Also you should avoid setting long lines of text in All-Caps because capital letter forms can be harder to read and process as words.

Are your links descriptive and not just ‘click here’?
This can help give context about where the link goes to. You could instead say, click here to learn more about (the subject…). Links should make sense out of context so if screen reader users land on them they will know where they go. Short phrases such as “click here,” “more,” “click for details,” are ambiguous when read out of context. Screen readers have key shortcuts that can jump between links in a page and using the tab key jumps between focusable objects like links & buttons. So a screen reader user may not have read nearby text that would give a short ‘click here’ more context. You should include the context withing the link text itself.

See the Introduction to Links and Hypertext guidance from WebAIM for more information about writing descriptive hyperlinks.

Tables

If you have tables, are they only used for tabular data?

Tables should only be used to show numerical data. They shouldn’t be used for layout like organizing out parts of the page into columns. In the late 1990s some designers used table-based layout which wasn’t an accessible practice.

Do you have a header row specified in your data table?
Each label on a column should be a true header cell TH instead of a regular cell. In WordPress you can tell that something is a header cell clicking in the cell while editing the post. Below the table if it says ‘TH’ in the tage tree it’s a header cell. For example the tag tree at the bottom of the editor might say: ‘TABLE > THEAD > TR > TH’. This is just above where it says “Word count”.

Are you using any complex tables with multiple header rows or both vertical and horizontal heading cells?

You should avoid using complex table because they can be challenging to make accessible and confusing to navigate for screen reader users. It may be better to convert a large complex table into two or more simple tables.

Testing

Can you tab keyboard your way through the web page?

A lot of assistive technology uses a form of tabbing to go through a page. If you
can’t tab through your page, you’ve got some issues.

Have you tested your page with an accessibility checker tool?
You can use a tool like the WAVE tool, Axe by Deque or Google Lighthouse from the inspect code developer’s tools in Chrome to check your page for accessibility issues.

Have you tested your webpage with a free screen reader like NVDA?

If you don’t have a screen reader installed you could contact your organization’s digital accessibility expert to ask if they could test it. Screen readers use keyboard tabbing & other key shortcuts to navigate through a webpage. For non-visual users, they know where they are in the page through audio announcements. Headings and other semantic elements become audio landmarks when navigating a page non-visually. Screen readers have key shortcuts that jump between headings and other landmarks so non-visual users can jump around in a non-linear fashion. The location where the Screen reader has navigated to is called the keyboard focus.

Some other good screen readers include:

You may already have a free screen reader installed in your OS.

References and Resources

Blog Post/Web Page Accessibility Checklist from Jacob Martella Web Development.

How to write an accessible blog from the University of Edinburgh.

Introduction to Links and Hypertext guidance from WebAIM.

Understanding the WCAG 2.1 guidelines related to color contrast from WAI (the web accessibility initiative).

Narrated PowerPoint presenation about blog post accessibility 13:21 – covering accessibility for images, headings, colors, typography hyperlinks, and tables.

WordPress accessibility course in LinkedIn Learning – covering creating accessible themes, plugin accessibility, authoring accessible content, and testing.

How to Make Your WordPress Website Accessible video 14:16 – covering how images, colors, and text should be accessbible and how plugins can help.