Blog Accessibility Checklist

Already know why accessibility is important and want to skip to the checklist? Click here to jump to the start of the checklist.

If not, let’s chat about why you need to make your blog – or any type of website – accessible.

Although over 1.3 billion people live with disabilities (that’s over 16% of the global population), the web continues to lack accessibility.

WebAIM – one of the accessibility checker tools I’ll tell y’all about later in this post – conducts an annual study of 1 million homepages to see how many are accessible. In 2023, 96.3% weren’t accessible for disabled users.

Why Your Website Need to Be Accessible

Now, you’re probably thinking “but Nina, I’m just a small website. What does it matter if my blog is accessible or not?”

Well first off, that’s incredibly ableist thinking and is just really really dumb. But if you need a benefit beyond just helping users, here are two:

1. 71% of disabled users will leave a website that isn’t accessible (I can verify this. I leave any site that’s not accessible, even if it’s technically accessible to me. If it’s not accessible to my fellow disabled folks, I’m out of there).
2. In many ways, Google operates as a disabled user since it can’t see or hear. Many of these elements are basic for user experience, so doing them will benefit SEO rankings.

Now, on a more personal note, both my grandma and myself are disabled. She is blind and I have ADHD. If you need a person to think of while doing this, feel free to think of one or both of us.

Most of these accessibility requirements I mention below first came to my attention because of our needs, like her desire to “see” my travel photos via alt text, or my inability to handle sites with distracting videos or videos I can’t speed up.

I am by no means a disability expert on every type of disability. I’m working hard every day to learn more and to ensure my blogs and courses are as user friendly as possible, no matter the learning style or disability of the individual.

I want to help you do the same.

Honestly, I don’t care if this helps you rank on Google or get more traffic. I just care that this helps disabled people who are used to getting the short end of the stick and not being able to enjoy web content.

This checklist is the start of making your site more accessible. Please take the time to go through it and make the necessary changes on your site to be more accessible.

Blog Accessibility Checklist:

How to Verify and Improve Your Website’s Accessibility

There are many sites that will help you verify your accessibility – and most are free!

• WebAIM Contrast Checker – Helps you figure out if the colours on your site are high contrast enough. I test my links, my normal font colours, and all my different background colours.
• WAVE – Check your website for accessibility errors. You’ll want to check your homepage and some blog pages.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – A free Ahrefs system that will send you a report of site errors, including all photos missing alt text on your site.
• Ahrefs Chrome Extension – A free tool that helps you check heading structure and alt text of any website.
• She Knows Alt Text – A custom GPT I built within ChatGPT to write alt text for you. Just feed it your URL or upload a picture and it will write alt text for all images it encounters. This requires a paid ChatGPT account.
• Hemingway App – My primary way of checking the readability of content.
• Readability Analyzer – Check the readability of your content and it’s language level. This is my 2nd method.
• VoiceOver on Mac – A screen reader built into Mac’s. Use this to test how your site “looks” to someone visually impaired.
• Markup Validation Service – Checks that all HTML elements are error free.

When in doubt: ask your users, listen to any disabled people who write you, and test out using your site using accessibility tools.

I do not recommend using most accessibility plugins as many actually disable the functionality of the tools most disabled people, like myself, already own and prefer using.

There are many plugins that offer this – and most are paid – for website owners, but they typically just messed up mine or my grandmother’s tools and ended up with us leaving the site.

Conclusion

I’ll keep it short and sweet: make your website accessible ASAP.

I know it can be annoying or seem tedious, but that’s how daily life is for myself and my disabled community. You can handle being a bit annoyed for 30 minutes sorting this stuff out. So just do it, ok?

If you need help applying any code, I recommend asking ChatGPT to help. It’s very good with WCAG guidelines (the standard for web accessibility).

If I missed anything glaring, please email support[at]sheknowsseo.co and we’ll get it added to the list ASAP.

Read More About Writing Blog Posts:

• Free SEO Content Writing Checklist for Bloggers: 25 Essentials to Include
• What is SEO Writing?: Beginners Guide to SEO for Blogs (with Examples!)
• 28 Best AI Copywriting Tools (SEO + Blogger Tested!)
• I Grew a Blog to 1.7k Pageviews with 12 Posts and 0 Backlinks. Here’s How!
• How Long Should a Blog Post Be for SEO?
• How Many Blog Posts Before Launching Your Blog?
• What to Do if Someone Copies Your Blog Post
• What is the Ideal Blog Post Title Length for SEO?
• How to Write SEO Blog Posts Title Your Audience Will Click

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