We Can Do’s New Structure and Appearance

As you know, We Can Do is a brand-new blog. That means I’m still looking for different ways to improve it. If you’re a regular reader at We Can Do, and if you’re sighted, then you may have noticed that I have now changed the visual appearance of We Can Do. (Is any change noticeable to readers with visual impairments using voice synthesized or Braille readers? I’d be interested to know.) Most importantly, I have changed the way that information is organized on the page. I would like your advice on whether this new presentation is helpful to you–even if you only read We Can Do on occasion.

You will notice that the main text of the newest blog post is now presented at the left hand side of this page. If you scroll down past the text of the newest post, you will see at the bottom a list of titles for the most recent few blog posts before it. (Or, if you’re blind, then you’ll hear or tactile that list!) You can click on any of these to read the post in question. Further down still is a list of links to other web sites of interest to people involved with fighting poverty and oppression among people with disabilities in developing countries.

There are also two navigation bars to the right. In these navigation bars you can find a search engine that will allow you to do a key-word search throughout the entire blog; you can browse through the We Can Do archives to make sure there’s nothing interesting here that you’ve missed; see the five most recent blog posts; link the 10 most popular blog posts at this time; see the list of categories into which I organize my blog posts (so, for example, if you want to see all my posts on deaf people, or all my posts related to the South Asian region, or whatever, then you can do that); see a list of the five most recently posted comments at this blog; and more.

Previously, if you clicked on, let’s say, the archives for all the posts made in the month of September, then the full text of all 17 of them would show up on the screen at once. Then if you wanted to skip over some of them, you could only do that by scrolling … and scrolling … and scrolling down the screen. Now, with this new structure, you only see the title and the first paragraph or so for each post in September, then you have to follow the link to see the rest of the post. That makes it easier to scroll down past the posts that aren’t relevant to your concerns to find the ones that are. I hope this improvement will assist readers in browsing through the backlog of posts at We Can Do (now 38, including this one).

I am limited in what changes I can make because I am not a computer programmer. Also, 99% of the structure and presentation of any blog hosted and programmed by wordpress.com is controlled by wordpress.com, not by me. However, if you encounter any frustrations with the appearance or presentation of this blog, then please do let me know. I have access to a limited range of possible “themes” for this blog, each of which organizes information in a somewhat different fashion. I am willing to explore alternatives–as long as they exist!

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