Introduction
I am now taking the "Web Accessibility" class at Carnegie Mellon University. I create this post (and also this blog) to test Blogger's accessibility features.
I did some survey on Internet and found only few comments and articles specifically discuss about Blogger's accessibility supports. Most of the discussions are fairly old, like "More on the Blogger Interface" (2007) and "Google's 'Blogger' Accessibility" (2006). More recently, in 2014, I also found a user complained how Google doesn't take Blogger's accessibility issues seriously in the "accessible" Google Group.
In this post, partially based on the guide line of accessibility supports of Google Site, I'll try to explore all the important accessibility features of Blogger.
Alternative Text (alt text)
Alternate text is perhaps the most well-known accessibility feature. During the process of inserting images, Blogger does not provide any boxes or even hints to add alternative text.
You need to click on the image you just inserted to find "Add caption" and "Properties" buttons.
 |
| You need to click on the image to add caption and set the properties. |
You then need to click on "Properties" to add title text and alternative text.
 |
You need to click on "Properties" to add title text and alternative text:
|
In this sense, Blogger's editor interface supports the functions of adding caption and alternative text, but not explicitly encourage it.
Section Headings
 |
| You can add 3 levels of heading tags in Blogger editor |
Blogger's editor has the function to add the following 3 levels of heading:
Heading <h2>
Subheading <h3>
Minor heading <h4>
normal
If you would like to use full 6 levels of heading tags, the only way to do it is to switch to the embedded HTML code editor.
In addition, the article title is by default in the "<h3>" heading tag, which could be very confusing. Blogger doesn't indicate this fact anywhere.
In addition, the article title is by default in the "<h3>" heading tag, which could be very confusing. Blogger doesn't indicate this fact anywhere.
HTML Tables
Blogger doesn't even have functionality to add regular table. (You can find some tutorials online to teach users how to do that.) Not to mention any accessibility functions relevant to HTML tables.
CSS Template
Some Blogger guidelines suggest users to pick more simple or more accessible Blogger CSS templates. However, Blogger doesn't provide any useful official resources, guidelines, or templates to make that easier. In fact, the newest Blogger accessible template I can find online is posted back in 2009.
Even worse, using heading tags and image captions would very likely to mess up your page layout, especially the distance between paragraphs and between images and text. Because some -- or maybe most -- CSS templates for Blogger don't expect bloggers would use so many heading tags to organize their post.
Keyboard Shortcuts
- control + b = Bold
- control + i = Italic
- control + l = Blockquote (when in HTML-mode only)
- control + z = Undo
- control + y = Redo
- control + shift + a = Link
- control + shift + p = Preview
- control + d = Save as Draft
- control + p = Publish Post
- control + s = Autosave and keep editing
- control + g = Indic transliteration
Conclusion
In sum, Blogger is not an ideal platform or tool so far to create accessible blogs. It has limited supports of accessibility features, and often you need to switch to HTML code editor to add more sophisticated accessible features (like adding 6 levels of heading tags), which is pretty much against the point of using Blogger: It's simple and elegant.
On the other hand, another similar product of Google, the Google Site, has a better set of accessibility features at the same time. Therefore, we might (or might not) expect Blogger will include those features in the future.
