As of Thursday evening, October 12, the programmers at BlogLines have pushed out changes that have once again restored accessibility of the service to blind and visually impaired Internet users. In fact, these changes serve to make a portion of the service even more accessible than it had been in the past. The following modifications have been made:

  • The image icons used to collapse and expand the My Feeds tree view have once again been turned into links that may be selected by pressing enter.

  • The collapse / expand icons now incorporate an alt tag that changes dynamically, announcing the name of the feed being expanded or collapsed.

  • The headings on the collapse / expand icons have been changed to divisions, restoring our ability to practically navigate the list of articles for a selected feed using the heading navigation commands provided by screen readers.

We thank Ben Lowery and his team of developers for making these crucial changes, once again restoring BlogLines to us as the most accessible web-based RSS aggregator for the blind and visually impaired.