/blind (slash blind) is a dedicated landing page on Travel Massive for blind readers.
The blind landing page contains the latest activity, posts, meetups, and classified ads so that blind members can stay up to date with what's happening in our community more easily using an audible screen reader.
👉 Try it out at www.travelmassive.com/blind
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Hey everyone,
We've created an experimental landing page on Travel Massive for blind readers. It's called "slash blind" because the URL is literally www.travelmassive.com/blind (get it?)
On this landing page you'll find the latest member activity, posts, upcoming meetups, and classified ads in a text only format, designed for screen readers.
I created this feature with @sassy-wyatt, the travel blogger behind Blind Girl Adventures after meeting her again in London this year. Sassy was having some difficulty reading our newsletter and showed me how she navigates the Travel Massive website as a blind user.
A quick explanation — accessible web browsers provide audible cues for the text, links and images from top to bottom of the page to help blind users navigate websites. But this can be very tedious if there's lots of links and images or a complicated UX. The alternative approach is the browser's built in text summary, but this also omits the comment section, which means that blind people are excluded from our conversations — this is not fair!
After hanging out with Sassy for the afternoon, we came up with an idea to create a more accessible page for blind users to read what's happening in the Travel Massive community.
How it works
We decided to name the landing page URL /blind so it's easy to remember and access, and put the latest posts and content in text format. Blind users can audibly read the page and get to all the content without needing to click around — and although there's thousands of words of text, people like Sassy can listen extremely fast!
If you're a blind user of Travel Massive we'd love if you can be a beta tester of the page and give us feedback!
Very cool. Is there a good resource page for this kinda thing re web standards etc if one wanted to implement something like this site-wide?
The W3C accessibility standards are probably the best place to start… but there’s no “cheat sheet” I’m aware of.
That said, these standards are mostly aimed at making existing web pages accessible.
For this project, we’re kinda taking the inverse approach and making it 100% designed for blind users. Just think: there’s no physical dimensions of a page if it’s plain text and delivered via a screen reader. So we can throw away all the unnecessary visual UX and just focus on the blind experience.
If this concept proves to be useful, maybe we could build a Wordpress plug-in that creates a /blind page automatically?
Yeah, I wonder if can use an alt style sheet much as you would to make a printer friendly page. Added to my rainy day list.
Great idea, thank you.
So good! Way to go.
Just making a note for myself here to include the real-time chat on the homepage on the /blind landing page.
Amazing! Something so simple yet so effective. Please keep us updated with what you learn along the way. We are already very conscious with accessibility on our website but can always do more!