I’m sitting in cafe or British Library, working on coding up Sophie’s fab new design for Storynory. I was just interrupted by a Skype user I did not know. I was a bit suspicious at first, but then delighted to find that I was chatting to a Storynory listener - born in 1997, Korean, living in Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam, the son (or daughter, not sure) of a Korean teacher in a school, and blind.

He or she was using a screen reader, which reads text off the screen. Obviously audio stories appeal to blind users, but they also need to be able to find their way around the text and links of the site. And that means designing with basic accessibility in mind - like not putting text into images, or at least using a good image replacement technique like Gilder / Livin. Currently our header has no text behind it, but I’m going to fix that in the new Storynory design.

Anyway I’m pleased to say that the user said that it was easy to find the way around our site.

One thing you are supposed to do is to put navigation sidebars below the main text in the markup. The idea is that the user doesn’t listen to the screen reader repeating the links again and again. I’m wondering about this. Surely it’s important to be able to find the navigation quickly…. ? Just thinking about this.