Accessibility is more than just people with blindness. Accessibility can be anyone with a disability.

There are people with low vision impairments such as cataracts, near and far sightedness, etc.

There are people with motor function disabilities, where they navigate use tap screens or keyboards and mouth sticks.

Even people with reading disabilities such as dyslexia.

(There are more to consider as well. This is not an exhaustive list)

In order to truly learn how to make an accessible website you need to consider a holistic approach to it. You have to apply multiple techniques to achieve a good understanding and compliance of your website for Accessibility.

WCAG, WebAIM are all good resources to start with.

Do not do this at all. The whole point of accessible design is to be inclusive, and creating a "blind experience" site only serves to segregate the overall learning process. Designers and engineers need to learn how to use screen readers first, not just get dumped straight into an experience where they would need to use assistive tech suddenly; their lack of training and experience will create a lot of negative effects on the process, usually pressuring them to solve for things they don't understand. Try designing With us, not For us.

Ultimately, if you are creating any website, just use native HTML 5 controls and follow the WCAG best practices. If you absolutely must have a custom control, if it can't be done with HTML or Aria, then it isn't worth building. There are already lots of sites out there that teach the best practices and ask the important questions of design and engineering when it comes to putting accessible websites together, plus good training from places like DeQue University. It's not only the blind experience you need to solve for, but visually impaired, mobility impaired, cognitively impaired, hearing and speech impaired, and people with epilepsy. That's all encompassed with inclusive design, and making an experience that you are thinking of breaks that entirely.

Its pretty easy to make a website that is completely accessible to people who are blind or vision impaired. don't use CSS or JavaScript. Be sure to use semantic HTML the way it was indented to be used. Be sure to include an appropriate amount of heading tags.

 

doing this you should be able to easily navigate the site with only a keyboard so that covers all disabled people that can't use a mouse.

 

now learn to use the popular screen reader NVDA to properly explore the page. its a free screen reader and most blind people use it. its a little tricky to get the hang up but if you spend a day trying to figure it out you should be able to. even if you are good at using it, it can be difficult to recognize where there issues if you are sighted because you can cheat without even realizing it. but if you do these things you should be able to make a site that is most likely accessible to everyone.

 

doing this is actually extremely easy but the final product isn't going to look great. the real challenge is to make a website that looks really good to sighted users AND has a lot of useful JavaScript functions. Even this isn't all that difficult but the majority of websites miss the mark by at least a little.

Fill it with Easter eggs! Make it so using each accessibility feature reveals another Easter egg.

I'm making a subreddit for gift ideas for blind people...though it just got finished yesterday so i don't have any people on it, but if you need a blind beta tester I'd be happy to do so

I worry it's just going to make the other web devs think that you can't make a good looking, fully functional, modern site screen reader accessible unless you strip it down to something from the early 90s. And that's not at all true.

The best thing to do in my experience is to simply have people actually use a screen reader them selves after teaching them the basics, with a good blindfold on. Have them try an existing site that's bad, one that's good, and best yet, something they made them selves.

Empathy seems to do allot with this kind of thing.

Besides, alternative versions of a website just for screen readers tend not to be a great idea either because they never end up getting updated at the same rate as the main site, and for certain sectors that can be a big problem. So starting off with the idea that it should be a custom thing VS thinking about it with every update of the main site and using good coding practices is kind of counterintuitive.

if someone made a website that was only explorable by reading text out of images and with graphical links all over the place, we'd not be happy. This seems a similar level of stupid to me.