Hi All!
I’ve recently updated the two tutorial sites on Bricolage and web-writing.
During this summer, you may want to go through them again to refresh your knowledge about:
1. How to use our Content Management System
2. How to get your point across on your pages
Mike and I are trying to make our site more accessible to users with vision challenges. These users browse the web using a screen reader. A screen reader allows visually impaired users to access web sites by interpreting sites and reading them aloud. It can also send that information to a Braille reading device.
The problem is that these screen readers can’t interpret images – they can only read text. This is where Alternative Text (alt text) comes in! When you use alt text to describe an image on your site, the screen reader will read this description. It will then be able to give the user some idea about what the image is about.
Please add alt text when uploading your images into Bricolage. Here’s an example:
An image I uploaded to Bricolage:
I have added this alt text: “woman walking toward tree on a fall day” to the image within Bricolage. I did that in the Alt Text box in the Content Section of the media element (right under Caption):
Here are some simple tips for writing alt text:
1. Keep it short – no longer than a tweet.
2. Describe what’s going on in the image.
3. If images are merely decorative – don’t add alt text to them. That is to say, if images don’t add any meaning to the content of the page – don’t add alt text. For example, let’s say that you added a border image to separate paragraphs on your site (I really don’t want you to ever do this!):
But if you did, you don’t need to add alt text to it!
4. Always add alt text to images that have words in them. An image of a logo, for instance, will have words in it that a screen reader will not be able to interpret. This logo adds meaning to the content of the page, and it should have alt text. For example, the Adams State logo at the top left of our site has this alt text: Adams State University Alamosa Colorado.
There’s a lot of information out there on alt text best practices. If you want to read more, here are some places to start:
http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternative_text_for_images
http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/accessibility/guidelines.html
http://www.umich.edu/webaccess/best/quickguide.html#alt
Please contact Mike or me if you have have questions!
Jen
When adding phone numbers to your web site, make sure to use dashes. This will make your web-site more mobile-app friendly:
Droid devices will only recognize phone numbers if they are in this format: ###-###-####
This means no dots or parentheses should be used in the formatting of a phone number.
Please make sure the phone numbers on your site use dashes – they need to be in the same format as the phone numbers on our site’s footer: 800-824-6494 and 719-587-7011
Mike and I have been thinking a lot about how we can give users a good experience when they use our site with mobile devices. One of these ways is to name links as clearly and precisely as possible. When online with a phone or tablet – a user no longer has a cursor that hovers over a link and brings up a “tooltip” that provides more information about that link.
Without this tooltip, it becomes even more important to give links names that describe exactly what users can expect to see when they click on them. Please never use something generic like “click here” or “here” for your link name (or your tooltip, for that matter).
click here for more info. TeeHee – just seeing if you guys are awake… 
Use this syntax model: mailto:whomever@wherever.com and paste the address into either:
For example, if I wanted to link to Mike Henderson’s email address, I would use this format: mailto:mhenderson@adams.edu
Watch a Video to find out more…
