Bringing back #WebsitesForWitchesWednesday … maybe. A quick IG Live about accessibility. For more (and far better) information please refer to actual accessibility experts (that I also am learning from)
Whatever you do… ** DO NOT USE Accessibe ** on your website.
From Overwhelmed to Online in 5 Lessons
Transcript
Got one really good question today. I mean, all questions are good.
Like with me, especially, you don’t have to be afraid to ask a question. I love questions. There’s no stupid question. There’s no. “Oh, I can’t bother you with this question.” Ask! That’s what I’m all about inside The Fiery Well. Like, don’t ask Google, ask me. Because don’t waste your time with Google. You’ll go down a rabbit hole of confusion and aggravation and, the Googling anyway.
Hi, if you don’t know who I am, I am Patty Ryan Lee and I am the witch, tarot reader, and web developer behind The Fiery Well, who is behind Get Online, Witch! A five lesson mini course that takes you from overwhelmed to online. I try my best to walk you through the basics, getting your domain, getting your email marketing set up,
thinking about your content, thinking about all of that. Because the website’s kind of the last thing you need and often you don’t need one at all. So if you have no website or you are completely overwhelmed with where to even start. Check out, check out, GetOnlineWitch.com. If you have a website and it frustrates the hell out of you and you have an established business, you’re service-based, pop over to thefierywell.com.
I might be able to better help you over there. So I used to do Websites For Witches Wednesday, kind of go live and answer questions and stuff, and, um, might bring that back. So I had a really good question about accessibility. And I don’t know if that pops up here or not. Oh, there we go. Resources about alt text and making a site more accessible.
I love this. Because you got to make a website for everybody. Everybody. And I am not an accessibility expert by any means. I do my damnedest to make my websites as accessible as I know how to. And I’m constantly learning. And I learn from resources such as getstark.co and I’ll put all of these somewhere in the replay. Smashing Magazine, and then the authoritative guide is the WCAG guide. And that can get really confusing to read because it’s very, I don’t know. It’s like legalees for what you need to think about for site accessibility. So the basics that I want you to make sure that you’re doing is adding alt text to most of your images.
Not every image needs alt text. There’s a really good article on Smashing Magazine that breaks that down and I’ll link that. And the other is color contrast. You want to make sure that there is enough contrast between colors, your background, color, and your text. That it’s legible. And it’s not straining on the eyes.
I used to do stark white. And black text. That’s actually pretty harsh on the eyes. So I’ve gone to mostly white background with it, almost black text. And it’s a little easier on the eye to read. Keep that in mind. You want contrast between colors, just because one, a large portion of the population is actually colorblind and there’s various degrees of colorblindness.
So you also don’t want to rely on color for things. When there’s color. You want to add other indicators, shapes, size, language itself. Stop doing, speaking of language, click here. You want to read this great article? Click here. You want to go to this great website, click here. Someone with a screen reader or an assistive device.
They’re just going to see click here. Click here, click here, click here, click here, click here, click here, click here, click here. And I don’t know about you, but that would be really fucking annoying. So you want to make sure that your links are descriptive. Use a verb instead of click here, read more about this particular blah, blah, blah.
Go to, and complete, fill out. It’s just a way of thinking if this is a verb, that’s the same as like click and lead it to that. That’s also great for your search engines, because if you’re using descriptive text in your link, that’s telling Google, these words are a link to something about that content. And the internet was born.
Links are very important. So stop using click here. Stop using click here in your emails too. Use good contrast between your colors. Don’t rely on color for information, always have something secondary shape, a size, all kinds of things. And then when it gets into the actual font sizes that you’re using… I talked about this in it workshop inside The Fiery Well recently.
Don’t use your H tags. There’s H one two three, four, five and six. And it’s harking back to the old newspaper days. H one is your headline fill up the page biggest text, there is. Don’t use an H one in the middle of a page, just because you want a bigger font. You’re breaking the structure of the page.
Think back if you’re writing articles or essays for college, if you’re breaking up an idea with a new idea, new heading use an H tag .But if you’re going to increase the size of a font, use CSS .WordPress originally now built in with the Guten block Gutenberg block editor, basically any post you’re making in WordPress, you can now control the paragraph font size
in the right-hand side of the screen, when you’re editing your post or your page. Stop using your headings for font size. Use headings as headings. To break up an idea, break up the information, new thought, continuing on a different thought. Think about this. Stop using it for font size.
But yeah, I will link more for accessibility. There is also a, uh, Instagram account hashtag Hey Alexa, or the real Alexa I’ll link her account as well. And she breaks this down. Also follow her on Twitter for social media. Because it’s everywhere. We want to be as accessible as possible everywhere, which is why I’m going to end this here.
Thank you for your question. And I will return probably next month and give everybody a little more lead up if you have any other questions. Uh, and maybe bring this back. But I will get this recording, hopefully Instagram will cooperate, and I can pull this down, toss it into Descript, transcribe it, and I’ll put it up on YouTube where it is even more accessible for those that don’t even use Instagram.
So, yeah. All right. I think that’s all. Thank you for your question and email me anytime. And I will gather them up and do this again. In the meantime, checkout getonlinewitch.com and if you’re just starting out and if you are service-based and have a business and you need a little more help with your tech and your business and all that shit.
I also curse. Check out thefierywell.com. All right. Thank you all. Bye.