Last week there was an incredible guest post on Skepchick written by Chris “Gonz Blinko” Hofstader about disability and skepticism. In his case, he lost his vision due to retinitis pigmentosa and spent several years and thousands of dollars on various alternative treatments to try to restore his sight. Of course none of the treatments helped and he is still blind. Skepticism would have done him a lot of good and saved him a lot of wasted time and money, and a lot of disappointment.

Unfortunately, all too often skeptical and atheist blogs aren’t very accessible, few books are available in alternative formats, and a lot of meetings are in inaccessible locations. This needs to change.

I’m gradually going to try to transition this site to be more compliant with W3C accessibility standards, a process that so far isn’t very difficult. I recently started adding alt text to images and intend to continue doing so. If I forget, feel free to let me know I missed one. My first attempt to do this was for the Northwest “Science” Museum writeup, with the number of pictures I included, that proved to be just a tad be time consuming, however it was a good reminder how inaccessible that post would have been for a blind reader.

As I have the time I will continue to try to find more ways to improve accessibility. Unfortunately I know I won’t have the time to provide transcripts of videos, so my apologies to the blind and deaf communities, however, Youtube videos do feature a really cool Closed Captioning service that can generate the captions for a video that doesn’t already have them.

Fortunately the current theme I’m running has some accidental accessibility built into it. Reader ~Pickles gave me a tip on a service called Vischeck which simulates colorblind vision. I ran their simulator on all three types of color vision deficiencies they offer and I was happy to see that everything is visible. It’s not as pretty, but the text and links are visible and distinguishable.

Making a site accessible is really a no brainer, after all, what’s good for the reader is good for the blogger. I blog so that people can read my material. If someone can’t easily access the material, then why would they bother coming back? People with disabilities have enough difficulty in life as it is, the least I can do is try to make so that my blog isn’t yet another source of difficulty.

If at any time a blog post isn’t accessible for you, let me know. I can’t fix things if I don’t know I screwed up.