Almost 2 years into being a “disability activist”, and I’ve finally started to take accessibility / inclusiveness for my own business seriously.

Embarrassing.

Both of our established sites “Disability Democracy” the home of our podcast  and our 501c4 “Not Without Us“… were not designed with accessibility and inclusiveness as a top priority.

I’ve been starting to work on our Disability Democracy site, but it is kind of hard to “fix” accessibility. You have to design it in from the beginning.

I’m starting with this web site and working my way through our others.

Unfortunately, web tools don’t “ship accessible” out of the box.

I use WordPress and it does have a number of Accessible WordPress Themes, but it is very easy to make your site less accessible when you focus on making it “look good”.

#DefaultAccessible

So, going forward, I’m building (and rebuilding) our web sites “Default Accessible”.

What does that mean:

1. Every page and all content will be built from the ground up to be formally accessible.
2. We will write all content in “plain language” form be default.
3. Where other accommodations are required (such as captioning for images and transcripts for audio and video)… we’ll do it.

I’ll update this as I go forward… feedback welcome.

I use BeaverBuilder as my page and site building tool. Like any tool, it can make almost anything… the problem is me (though we should work to have the default setup “accessible” and warnings when you aren’t).

I’ve started looking into the other major web platforms on accessibility… it is not a great story. More to follow.