I’m going to start blogging for the deaf:
FIRST OF ALL I’D LIKE TO THANK MY DEAF READERS FOR COMING TODAY. WE LOVE OUR FELLOW DEAF PEOPLE AND THINK THEY ARE JUST LIKE REGULAR PEOPLE ONLY… WHAT’S THAT?…
Oh. My producer is telling me that I don’t need to yell on my blog for deaf people. I guess they must have one of those newfangled hearing-impaired Blog Reading Devices (or, BRDs for the acronymically-inclined).
However, there is another group of people I’d like to welcome to Nanny Goats in Panties and that’s the blind people. You heard me (YOU TOO, DEAF PEOPLE! – I mean – you too, deaf people.)
Anyway, to all my new blind readers:
HELLO TO ALL MY NEW BLIND FANS! CAN YOU SEE ME OKAY? FIRST OF ALL, I’D JUST LIKE TO SAY THAT WE LOVE BLIND PEOPLE. AND THAT WE HERE AT NANNY GOATS IN PANTIES CONSIDER YOU TO BE JUST LIKE NORMAL HUMANS…WHAT’S THAT?
Oh. What? Them too? Excuse me, my producer has just informed me that we don’t need to yell at the blind people, either. Boy, the next thing you’re going to tell me is that we don’t need to yell at dumb people as well.
Anyway, now that all the niceties are past us, I’d like to tell all you other insensitive bloggers how to be more accessible to the visually impaired. Seriously. You probably didn’t even realize that blind people surf the internet all the time. And that’s why I’m here to help. ‘Cause I’m a helper.
So, according to the American Federation for the Blind, here are just a few tips:
- If you have a blog roll, move it to your left-hand sidebar. Blind people use screen readers that begin from right-to-left and the last thing they want to do is listen to one long ass list of links before getting to your blog post for the day.
- If you want comments, don’t make them “enter characters seen in an image”. Also, if you can, label all your text entries in the comment form properly so they know what you are asking for.
- Describe your images. In HTML, you can provide alternative text for images by adding alt=”your description of the image” within the image tag. Here is an example of a properly alt-tagged image:
< img alt=”blind man walks into bar” height=”30″ src=”imgdir/blindmansbrokentooth.jpg” width=”30″ />
It’s all about making your site more accessible. For more detailed info, you can go to the site from the AFB (American Federation for the Blind).
So if you know any visually impaired or blind people, send them to Nanny Goats in Panties. Or if YOU are visually impaired or blind, I’d love your feedback. But your Martian friends? You can tell them to forget it. We don’t need their kind here, the green boyfriend-stealing bastards.
