Accessibility

I am making some changes to the website to improve its accessibility for the blind and those with difficulty seeing.

I'm currently making changes to the individual articles. Most of the problems seem to be with appropriate alternate text and with the inline footnotes. This will take some time. If you have problems reading one of the articles that I haven't improved yet, please let me know.

There were three major changes to the overall site design. First, the pastel green background is now white. The white background with black text provides more contrast than the pale green.

Second, the menu at the top of the page is gone. The menu items were too small and were dark green on light green–even worse than black on green. While I was working on the menu I discovered that the hamburger menu for tablets and phones was not working anyway, so I removed the menu altogether. If you want to see a list of the categories of articles on the site, click on the "Categories" link at the bottom of each page.

Last, among the obvious changes, the text over the image in the sidebar or footer is now white on black. In general, text over images is hard to do right. It doesn't always provide enough contrast, in fact I had trouble reading it myself and I knew what it said. White on black was a "quick fix". Maybe I'll figure out something better later.

The family trees section of the website is generated by a separate software program. Most of it seems to pass the accessibility test, except for–you guessed it–the hamburger menu. I will get to that in time. On a full screen desktop there seem to be no significant accessibility problems with the family trees.

The original article above was written November 29, 2022

Edited May 17, 2023

A few more changes: All links are now underlined. The index page has the correct order of headings.