Welcome back to another edition of {Kids: Code} Weekly! This week we’re going to touch on a topic we’ve covered previously and that’s “accessibility.” What does accessibility mean and how does computer programming play into it? Well, read on to find out! Be sure to also check out our “News & Updates” section below for information on the future of our {Kids: Code} newsletter.
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For our final tutorial, we wanted to talk about one important piece of coding that can be overlooked some times: accessibility. What's accessibility? It means providing alternative interfaces for users who might need assistance.
You may know someone who has impaired vision or blindness, or who has impaired hearing or deafness. They use technology too, just sometimes with different approaches. For instance, someone with impaired vision might use what's called a screen reader that allows them to listen to a spoken form of content. A person with impaired hearing might need subtitles, which allows them to read the content of a video.
Let's take a look at one easy way we can make our websites easier for visually impaired users.
Alternate Text Content
When you're placing an image on a website, you might use the following tag:
<img src="/path/to/my/image.png" />
That displays an image, with no real styling or changes. The problem is that a screen reader cannot tell what the image is, and so they can't tell a user anything about the image. We can add a special alt attribute to this to enable it:
<img src="/path/to/my/image.png" alt="A description of this image" />
Now a screen reader can tell a user more about the contents of the image! alt is one of the easiest changes you can make to your websites to enable accessibility for users who need it. You can do more with HTML, too (specifying aria attributes will sometimes work even better).
Ultimately, the biggest takeaway here is that technology should work for users, and it should make their lives easier. Some users need a little extra work to make this happen, but with a little bit of alt attribute magic, we can get there.
Some Sad News
We've had to make the unfortunate decision to wind down publication of {Kids: Code}. Next week's issue (#26) will be our last.
Why are we stopping? Well, it hopefully goes without saying that we've loved being invited into your inboxes each week, and we love teaching kids how to code. It's hard to compete with the sea of great tutorials for learning to code - services, books and more - and we were unable to find the level of reader support that would sustain publishing this week over week.
Next week, we'll devote our entire final issue to providing links and pointers to safe, helpful places where kids can safely continue to learn how to code. All of our past issues will remain available in archived form for any readers who found them helpful.
We hope your coding journey continues, and we thank you so much for letting us be a part of it.
The {Kids: Code} Team
This Week’s Vocabulary Word
Accessibility
Technology that provides alternative interfaces - audio, video captions, and more - for users who might need assistive technology.