Where’s the beef … uh … site menu?

Initially, I chose the NanoSpace WordPress theme because I liked its particular combination of features, plus, it was FREE. TRULY, free.

Truly, free? Yes, there is nothing more annoying than reading historical article after historical article on the Internet concerning “free” themes, only to install one, then discover it now has a “premium” version that is NOT free. I get this principle; I just wish all the people who posted articles would update their articles!

But I digress. A problem I noticed was that the primary navigation menu (Home, Books, Author’s Notes, etc.) did NOT appear when the site was viewed in the Microsoft Edge browser. Instead, something called a Mobile menu appeared, yet didn’t contain the menu items. Chrome and Firefox were fine, but not Edge. However, simply recommending users not use Edge is NOT a solution.

Further experimentation revealed that some WordPress themes exhibit this same behavior, while others do not, so while this initially seems an Edge bug, I am inclined to tag it as more of a theme bug than an Edge bug.

So, I very reluctantly went looking for some alternative WordPress theme I could live with which did NOT present this Edge bug, but which also worked with Chrome and Firefox, because anything which works in all three of those browsers tends to work in most browsers. Unfortunately, most resources which would orginarily advise one in choice of theme are written by sighted persons for sighted persons, so most of the focus is on dumbed-down “drag and drop” design and other “eyecandy” slick design features no blind or visually impaired designer can utilize, so one is left with little choice but to randomly try theme after theme until one stumbles across something they can live with.

As I write this update to my original post on this topic, I am not entirely happy with my final theme choice, but at least it works on all the major browsers. Unfortunately, the free version of said theme would not allow me to customize everything I wanted to customize, necessitating the purchase of its premium version, or the use of an overly complicated code plugin to achieve results without the premium purchase. However, if I’m going to write code, I might as well ditch WordPress and do it the old-fashioned way with my own HTML code, server side includes and scripts. I suppose there is a case to be made for using code on WordPress websites; it just wasn’t my case. Let me do what I want to do in a simple customization panel and move on. Don’t make me jump through hoops writing code and clicking all the right things to get it to reflect in all the right places. Sometimes, you just want something to work as simply as possible so you can move on to other things, not be forced to trudge up some steep learning curve.

So, if the site doesn’t look quite as smashing as it did under NanoSpace, you can blame that on my having to find some alternative theme and the lack of resources available for blind WordPress designers. I’ll either stick with this new theme for a while, or eventually stumble quite accidentally across something I like better. Perhaps I’ll grow to like this new theme, given time.