On the podcast today we have Joe Dolson. Joe is a WordPress plugin developer, a core committer, and a web accessibility consultant. He’s part of the Make WordPress Accessible team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. His recent presentation at WordCamp US entitled ‘Finding and Fixing the Six Most Common WCAG 2 Failures’, highlights some of …
WordPress Accessibility Day 2022 Opens Call for Speakers and Sponsors
WordPress Accessibility Day, a free, 24-hour virtual event, is set for November 2-3, 2022. The event was first founded in 2020 and will continue this year led by Joe Dolson and Amber Hinds. It was previously run by the WordPress core Accessibility Team through the WordPress Foundation but organizers are running it independently this year for ease of planning. Sessions …
#12 – Amber Hinds on Why Accessibility Matters
About this episode. On the podcast today we have Amber Hinds. She works at Equalize Digital, and became interested in online accessibility when she was given the job of creating a website for a public university. Given that the site was funded with public money, the finished site needed to be built with accessibility in mind. Since then Amber has …
Colorado Becomes First State to Require State and Local Government Websites to Meet Accessibility Standards
Today marks the 31st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a civil rights law passed in 1990 that prohibits discrimination against people with physical or mental impairments that substantially limit a major life activity. The legislation continues to help disabled people gain equal access to employment, schools, transportation, government services, and public accommodations. In a speech at the …
W3C Selects Craft CMS for Redesign Project
W3C has selected Craft CMS over Statamic for its redesign project, after dropping WordPress from consideration in an earlier round of elimination: In the end, our decision mostly came down to available resources. Craft had already committed to reach AA compliance in Craft 4 (it is currently on version 3.5, the release of version 4 is planned for April 2021). …
Gutenberg 6.3 Improves Accessibility with New Navigation and Edit Modes
Major accessibility improvements are the headline feature of this week’s Gutenberg plugin release. Version 6.3 introduces new Navigation and Editor modes to address long-standing problems navigating the block UI with a screen reader. The editor is now loaded in Navigation mode by default. Riad Benguella described it as “an important milestone in terms of accessibility of the editor” and explained …
WordPress Theme Review Team Initiates New Long Term Plan to Make All WordPress.org Themes Accessible
The WordPress Theme Review Team (TRT) met today and agreed to put new accessibility requirements in place for themes hosted in the official directory. These include some of the items that are required for theme authors who want to add the accessibility-ready tag. A handful of these requirements will soon be added to the standard requirements for all themes. The …
WPWeekly Episode 351 – Results of the Gutenberg Accessibility Audit
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Rachel Cherry, Senior Software Engineer for Disney Interactive and Director of WPCampus and Brian DeConinck, a front-end designer and developer with the OIT Design and Web Services team, part of the Office of Information Technology at NC State University. We learn how Tenon was chosen as the vendor to perform the audit and what …
New Tools for Theme Developers: Theme Sniffer Plugin and Automated Accessibility Testing
WordPress contributor teams have shipped several new tools for theme developers in the past couple weeks, which have the potential to raise the quality of new themes coming into the ecosystem. The Theme Sniffer plugin is a new effort from the Theme Review team that uses custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer to test a theme against WordPress coding standards and check …
WPWeekly Episode 301 – WordPress in HigherEd, Accessibility, and More With Rachel Cherry
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Rachel Cherry, Senior Software Engineer for Disney Interactive and Director of WPCampus. Cherry describes how she got involved with WordPress, its use in higher education, the inspiration behind WPCampus, and her thoughts on accessibility both in WordPress and across the web. She also assigned everyone the following homework assignment. …