WordPress’ Accessibility team will be hosting a hackathon at Contributor Day on Sunday, December 9, at WordCamp US in Nashville. The team will be joined by lead developers from Deque Systems, a widely respected accessibility firm in the industry, with the goal of setting up automated accessibility testing for WordPress core. The event has been…
WordPress’ accessibility team has published a statement on the level of overall accessibility of Gutenberg. The team, largely a group of unpaid volunteers, collaborated on a detailed assessment that publicly challenges Gutenberg’s readiness for core in a way that no other WordPress team has done through official channels to date. After a week of testing…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Topher DeRosia, a developer evangelist for BigCommerce. DeRosia introduces what BigCommerce is, why users and developers should take a look at it, and why they’re making a big push into the WordPress space. He also provides an update on HeroPress and why next year, you’ll…
WPCampus is looking to hire a company to perform an accessibility audit of the Gutenberg editor. The organization is a community of more than 800 web professionals, educators, and others who work with WordPress in higher education. WPCampus director Rachel Cherry published a request for proposals detailing the organization’s specific concerns: Our organization is sensitive…
The Gutenberg team has officially responded to recent concerns about the new editor’s accessibility. Matias Ventura, the project’s technical lead, published a post with examples of the accessibility efforts the team has made, many which may not be easy to discover. These include features such as keyboard shortcuts, slash command and insertion, high-contrast mode, and…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I have a lengthy discussion about the numerous Accessibility concerns being raised by members of the community. We also talk about the WordPress 5.0 release date, tempers flaring in the WordPress core Slack channel, dealing with political situations within the WordPress project, and more. We share our thoughts…
Discussion surrounding Gutenberg’s independent accessibility audit is heating up. Two weeks ago, Matthew MacPherson, who was named WordPress 5.0’s new accessibility lead, proposed the audit and agreed to it being performed by an independent third party. The audit had gained strong support among accessibility contributors and others following the ticket. After soliciting detailed proposals from…
A pre-release of Gutenberg 4.0 RC 1 is now available for testing. During today’s core developer chat, Matias Ventura, the project’s technical lead, said he plans to post a full changelog and a video tomorrow. In the meantime, a call for testing 4.0 RC 1 has been posted to the make.wordpress.org/test blog with a list…
WordPress Accessibility Team lead Rian Rietveld has resigned due to what she describes as political complications and problems with working on Gutenberg accessibility. “The last year, especially the last few weeks have been too politically complicated for me,” Rietveld said. “It’s better that someone else takes the lead now.” Her post outlines challenges the accessibility…
Lyft has open sourced its color algorithm for creating an accessible color system. The company’s design team also packaged the algorithm as a web tool called ColorBox. It makes it easy for anyone to produce color sets with accessible contrast ratios, as outlined in the WCAG 2.0 standards. “We made accessibility a cornerstone of our…
The WordPress Accessibility team is seeking contributors for its handbook project. It’s a collection of tips, resources, tools, and best practices. The goal is to educate users through summaries, articles, and reference materials. The handbook was created after the accessibility team repeatedly noticed the same accessibility issues cropping up and not having a central place…
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…
The WooCommerce development team has forked select2 to create a more accessible, drop-in replacement library called selectWoo. select2 is a widely used jQuery-based library for making custom drop down menus. Many users are wondering if the project has been abandoned, because the repository hasn’t seen any activity since February and 115 pull requests have piled…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by David A. Kennedy. Kennedy is a Theminator at Automattic and an accessibility advocate. Kennedy joined us to talk about the future of Underscores, a starter theme created by Automattic in 2012. We discussed how Gutenberg may impact theme development in general and some of…
When images are uploaded in WordPress 4.6.1 that have an empty alt text value, WordPress tries to generate one based on the caption text or the image title. If the image title is non descriptive as is common with photos uploaded from digital cameras, the alt text can be meaningless. In WordPress 4.7, the caption text and the image…