Accessibility Improvements on Chamline

For Accessibility reasons, to help reduce eye strain, I have been looking into blog themes that offer Light and Dark mode switching options. A bonus point if it also switches automatically based on user device settings.

Although I used RSS clients which collate all new posts from feeds and provide a reading experience from within the app, when it comes to reading, my preference is to read published posts on the actual blog/website.

I love reading blogs. The more personal the blog in terms of the writing style and the look & feel, the better.

I loved the simplicity of the previous Ghost theme I had on Chamline, it ticked plenty of boxes for my liking, except it didn’t offer Light and Dark mode switching options. It was either plug-and-play or I customised it to a permanent Dark mode, or whatever background colour I wished. I didn’t find it ideal but stuck with it as I settled into this blogging journey.

Reflect, by High Five Themes, offers the above. I like the clean, simple, almost minimalistic look and feel. The way it lists blog posts on the homepage is not to my liking, however, so as of writing this, I'm currently using the grid layout (when viewed on desktop or tablets). I will be diving through the theme files in the coming days to make further customisations.

URL Structures

The previous theme was a Newsletter theme with a landing ‘Home’ page, meaning you have to set up a ‘Blog’ page for your blog post listings. This had an effect on the RSS Feed url, which was on /blog/rss. Going forward, I will be paying particular attention to the url structure of any future themes I may wish to use for the blog to make sure it doesn’t have any unnecessary slug structure. Keeping it simple.

The new RSS Feed: https://www.chamline.net/rss/

I have set up redirects so hopefully you do not have to subscribe again to the new RSS Feed. Implementing redirects on Ghost is a Lab experimental feature, so I'm not sure if it works. If you have been subscribed to the previous RSS Feed (https://www.chamline.net/blog/rss/) before Jan 10 2024 and this post appears in your RSS Feed, then I take it the redirect is working. If you come across this post anywhere else and not your RSS Feed and you still wish to receive new posts in your feed, then please update to the new RSS Feed.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but to provide better Accessibility, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s worth it. 🙂

I’d be grateful, if you’d be so kind to let me know via Mastodon or Email if the redirect works or not.