The Angel’s Landing Accessibility Effort
Doing my part to make sure the web is for everyone!
April 8th, 2025.
When I first joined Neocities, a lot of the websites I visited had notes for potential mobile users. They often said something along the lines of “This website isn’t made for phones, go on a computer!” or “Mobile users eat shit” or things of that nature. Being an amateur coder at the time, I put a disclaimer on my own site stating that it is not mobile accessible. I promptly forgot about it and continued learning to code, and I’ve gotten to where I am today, on v2 of my website and writing this blog post.
There was one big thing that made me want to focus on accessibility, but some smaller things I had noted previously didn’t hurt the development of that idea.
While working on v1.5, there was no significant CSS. Everything was just plain tags and a few colors, like the super old web. I did this to make the code in my site easier to modify long term, because v1 was becoming a spaghetti mess. While working on this, I noticed that Firefox offered me an option to read my webpage in Reading Mode. I thought that might be helpful, so I made a mental note to look into that later.
Now that we’re on v2, a lot of my theme from v1 is back. Blog posts, diaries, and silly drawings of Cake galore. Because I’ve always used the display: grid; property, my website doesn’t look too bad on mobile. I do notice I can’t use a reading mode tool anymore though, and everything is just a little unwieldy. The best way to visit Angel’s Landing was still a computer.
One day, I’m perusing Neocities as one does, and I came across this blog post by Whiona. In the post, she talks about how fibromyalgia has affected her web browsing. She can’t use her computer as much as she likes because of the pain it causes, so using a phone to surf the web is a more viable option. Unfortunately, a lot of sites on the indie web are not built with mobile in mind or are actively hostile to the idea. She goes into more detail about her situation in the post, I encourage you to read it if you haven’t! The point I’d like to make is that this made me realize that I hadn’t considered disability in the creation of my site at all.
I have zero experience with physical disability, but I have issues of my own. I’ve felt what it feels like to want to experience something, but you can’t because the environment is hostile to your health for whatever reason. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did not consider how this could happen on the internet as well. Angel’s Landing is a place for me to share things I’m passionate about with as many people who visit. I do not want to contribute to the mountain of sites that alienate mobile users. In all honesty, I consider the self-expression and ideas shared on my site to be its primary purpose. No matter the reasoning behind someone visiting on Angel’s Landing, they should still be able to view the text displayed here.
What does this mean for Angel’s Landing?
As a result of what I’ve mentioned above, I’ve begun work to make my site more accessible. It will certainly take a while, require re-coding some things, a lot of trial and error, and some patience. But at the end of the day, that’s my every day when building a website. I have fun either way, and I’d like to make a place where all are welcome.
I’m sure some of my sillier pages and the stylization present on this site will need to be adjusted, but I’ll do my best to find a middle ground in that regard. Angel’s Landing will still probably always be best viewed on a computer, but I will do my best to make sure it is usable on mobile. I also want to mention that I am not talking solely about mobile accessibility. I want screen readers to be able to read the site, and make sure you can navigate with a keyboard. If there are any tools used for web accessibility that I could optimize for, please let me know.
I’ll be making a point to consider accessibility in any new pages from now on. I will also create a list of goals I intend to meet. These will be listed on the accessibility page and should be true across the entire site. If you run into any issues, have suggestions, complaints, comments, or otherwise, send me an email at angel at angelnetcast dot com and I’ll get back to you when I can.
What needs to be done?
I’m only one person and this website is just a fun project so this will probably take a while. Here’s what I know I need to work on, so you can have an idea of what’s to come.
- Check font sizes
- Check color contrast
- Pausable GIFs
- Swap to semantic HTML
- Use aria tags