Make your site more accessible (which will improve your SEO) on May 9th

OK, so you aren’t doing any meetups for Global Accessibility Awareness Day. That’s OK. There’s something you can still do very easily. It will make your site more accessible to those who need screen readers, and in a karmic twist, will also allow Google and other search engines to understand your site better. Anything that helps a screen reader, will help Google’s bots understand your content.

Open up your website. Unplug your mouse. Now surf your website with a keyboard alone. This will give you an idea of what it’s like to surf your website with an assistive device.

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Meetup Organizers call to action: Please help spread the word about Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is coming upon us, and I wanted to reach out to the community and ask that you help spread the word. We currently have a talk scheduled in the following places: Los Angeles, Geneva, New York, Toronto, Montreal, San Diego and more TBA soon.

In addition to those places, it looks like we will have major support in Mumbai! It will be a semi-government event over there! Not bad for our first year!

If there is no talk going on in your city, would you consider setting one up? If you can’t find a speaker in the Accessibility community, gmail me @ joedevon and I’ll try to help you find one. But even without one, just start your next meetup by asking the audience to volunteer a URL to try out…and surf that site without a mouse. This will partly simulate what’s it’s like to surf a site with an assistive device.

Besides helping make your site more accessible to those with accessibility needs, you will simultaneously be making it more friendly to Search Engines. Thank you.