Accessible Net is up and running!
Wow, okay. This took me way too much time and energy for me to write, it's been two weeks since I started to write this and only now managed to finish, but I'm still feeling really happy and excited. Go check out the Accessible Net page if you haven't already! Now onto the blog post.
Finally!! After almost two months of coding and gathering resources and wracking my brain to write these guidelines, Accessible Net is open and accepting members!! I was much more nervous at the start than I thought I would be to be honest. It's kind of hitting me now that this is actually being used a resource for people now, I can only hope I’m setting a good example.
This whole time I have been struggling with…how do I get anyone interested in accessibility. Like, is the average person just gonna give up when they see all these guidelines they don't fit the criteria for because they feel like it's not worth the effort? I tried really hard to emphasize that even if you don't fit the guidelines it's definitely still worth a shot to improve!
And yeah I know that the people who don't care about making the effort aren't worth trying to convince, but it's important to me that this not come off as like. An elite club of only the best accessible websites, and if you don't meet the criteria you don't belong and never will.
Anyway! It seems like that fear was unfounded because I’ve been seeing a lot of people really show interest in learning accessibility but found it too daunting before, or just didn't know where to start at all. It makes me very happy that at least some people would see what I’m doing and decide to treat it as a goal rather than an unachievable standard.
This is my first ever real project besides making my website, and this was honestly so much more work! The coding was handled relatively quickly, with help in part to Kale for letting me use their directory fork (good thing I switched off Neocities so could use PHP, making and continuing to update this his all manually would have been so annoying), gathering the resources definitely was more work, but by FAR the hardest thing was simply writing the guidelines!
I mean, to start with, I wasn't even sure how to define an accessible website, and at first I even thought about making most things optional and hope people joining the directory continue to work on their sites. Then, after reading through the points I thought…. wait. A lot of these are pretty simple, or at the very least are like, the bare minimum you can do. I can't have a directory where half the websites aren't even functional on a slightly smaller than average screen size, or are practically unreadable even to a sighted person. So I had to scrap that idea and make it a lot more strict, for lack of a better term. Although some of them are still optional, or in some cases aspirational? I guess? Just to give people some room to work.
So I ended up doing a lot of work drawing up the guidelines and THEN going into explaining why each guideline was important, and adding links relevant to each guideline. What often happened was I would type out the explanation and then found that I didn't know how to write it so it sounded more like a human being. I couldn't simplify it or make it more concise. Shout out to goblin tools formalizer. Did a lot of that work for me.
Anyway, I can't stress enough how amazing it's been to see people actually using my resources and say that they're working towards making their sites fit the guidelines so they can be part of the directory!!! It's made so many of my worries go away. It means so much to me, thank you so much!!