Whimsica11y

Welcome to Web Accessibility

Hey, want your homepage to be more inclusive? We'd like to help you with that :)

This website is being "built in public" and is still very much
🏗️ Under Construction 🚧

If you have ideas or suggestions, feel free to contact me

Web accessibility guides and advice online are heavily geared towards businesses and public services. This doesn't make the advice wrong by any means, but it can make it hard to read, and to connect with the rather different goals of a personal website.

Whimsic accessibility, I suppose? Whimsic was a word, once. We all need more whimsy.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Principles

The WCAG principles form the acronym "POUR", and state that a site should be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust:

These P.O.U.R. principles are at the root of the guidelines. They also make sense - what use is a website if its contents can't be perceived, the controls can't be operated, the content isn't understandable, and it keeps breaking?

WCAG Documentation

The WCAG have covered almost everything, which is great. It also has almost everything, which is... a lot.

The guidelines are available for everyone to read. They're worth perusing if you would like some extremely dense bedtime reading! There is a lot to chew through though, so I would recommend using it more as a reference. When something seems unclear in accessibility advice you've read, you can go search for the issue you're concerned about and see if it clears it up for you:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2

A Gentle Warning !
If you think the WCAG is sort of inaccessible and hard to get into, you'd be right. It's a bit of an irony, and a beast of a document. I'm linking it here because you should be able to fnd it easily - but if it puts you off, don't worry!

A much friendlier introduction can be found at the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)'s Introduction to Web Accessibility.

Here we'll take it bit by bit, and try to apply its principles to our homepages.

For more on these principles, please see the guide page, and the testing page to help you find issues on your own site :)

WCAG and the Smol / Indie / Revival Web

There are, however, some caveats here. Personal websites are a little different to corporate, government or educational entities.

Users?

Firstly, do personal homepages have users? Do we expect people to 'use' our homepage, or visit? Read? Look at? Enjoy? Are they invited in to a little online part of our personal world? In this case, they are visitors, or even guests.

We used to even place guest books on our websites. Many of us still do! They are currently enjoying a revival :)

The term user, guest and visitor will be used interchangeably on this website.

Perceivable and Understandable

Some of these personal websites are art. Some of them, even to a 20-20 sighted, able bodied visitor, are not fully understandable, or have hidden easter eggs that may not ever be perceived. We don't want these pieces of art to go away.

If the website is to be explored, to allow for surprises, maybe even make people confused on purpose - cool. We love that stuff. Key here, is to allow exploration not only with eyes and a mouse. I'm not entirely sure what form this would take. I would love to see people jump into this space and play with it! Only by exploration and experimentation can we push the web platform forward, and open up new possibilities to everyone.

Here there is a balance between efficiency and ease of use, versus wanting a visitor to take their time. How do we manage that without being making things frustrating, or too difficult?

Personality

People have argued that accessibility guidelines rob websites of personality. This isn't true.

Personality shines through in the words used in text. A flowery, colorful image can have colorful and flowery ALT text to describe it.

As an example, an image that might be purely decorative on a corporate website (consider the ubiquitous photo of office workers laughing, looking at a laptop screen) should indeed be ignored for screen readers. In a similar position on the page, a personal website might have some art, or a fun graphic, or anything else that adds to the ✨vibes✨ of the site! These shouldn't be ignored. Add some ALT text! Go ahead and write silly, funny, or even sexy alt text, if that describes the graphic best.

Personality may also come through via audio. Some actions on your site could trigger sounds. Blog posts could be recorded in audio, maybe as a podcast. Why not?

Welcome to Whimsically!

Please browse around, and please do feel free to contact me with any suggestions and questions!