Today is the release of the first episode of The Accessibility Show on WPBuilds – a podcast series I’m doing with the marvelous Nathan Wrigley. The Accessibility Show is going to focus on one issue per show: just one interface component or just one accessibility issue, then examine it in a set of various sites. Where are we sourcing the sites? The WordPress Showcase. The showcase is a particularly interesting source for information. Like many design collections, this holds sites […]
Continue reading “Launch of The Accessibility Show on WP Builds” »Category: Accessibility
Overlays Misunderstand Accessibility
Accessibility overlays are a peculiar approach to accessibility problems. They make many assumptions that demonstrate a failure to understand assistive technology and human needs. As a concept, overlays are fundamentally flawed, because they are used by a website, not a human being. Labeling disability before function For example, AccessiBe has several accessibility modes. These modes are labeled by disability type, like “ADHD mode.” This reflects a fundamental failure to understand assistive technology and what real users need. A tool to […]
Continue reading “Overlays Misunderstand Accessibility” »Hover Color Contrast Bookmarklet
This past weekend, I was looking at a WordPress trac ticket about hover color contrast in the admin. One of the things that was frustrating about this ticket is the amount of labor expected in testing – because accessibility tools mostly test the page as is. It’s certainly possible to implement automated tooling that can look at all of that, but introducing a whole new suite of tests to WordPress core was outside of my area of expertise. But a […]
Continue reading “Hover Color Contrast Bookmarklet” »2023: Year in Review
Minor miracle for me to get one of these done three years in a row – but let’s get it rolling! This got delayed because I’m recovering from minor surgery, but here we go… WordPress Contributions I made 85 commits to WordPress core in 2023 – almost three times as many as in 2022. This included committing some significant accessibility fixes and adding a new function that generates the markup for admin notices. This was the first year I’ve been […]
Continue reading “2023: Year in Review” »The WordPress Showcase & Accessibility
If you aren’t familiar with it, WordPress publishes a showcase featuring prominent sites that have been built using WordPress. The goal of the showcase, as stated in the submissions page, is to “show the world what can be done with WordPress and help demonstrate the tremendous capabilities it has as a publishing platform.” This may shock you, but there are no accessibility criteria for selection. I know – I just shook your world. I’ve just finished doing a *very* quick […]
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