This morning, I had a conversation that highlighted for me one of the challenges WordPress faces in shaking off the label “not accessible”. It was a conversation with a large university system that was considering deploying WordPress as a resource for faculty blogs, within the institutional requirements that the site had to comply with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 at level AA. They’d had the test installation reviewed by an expert blind user with JAWS, who had come back […]
Continue reading “WordPress & Accessibility: Just where is the problem?” »Category: Accessibility
One year of accessibility-ready
On December 12th, 2013, WordPress 3.8 was released. With that release, the accessibility-ready tag was added to the WordPress theme repository. This addition was the result of over a year of planning and organization to make sure that we had buy-in from the WordPress theme review team, a set of guidelines to follow that the WordPress accessibility team could get behind, without creating demands on theme developers that would make conformance impractical. It’s been one year today since finding WordPress […]
Continue reading “One year ofaccessibility-ready
” »The Headings Hierarchy Challenge
TL;DR: Headings are super-important. There are many reasonable models, but consistency is more important than either choice. Working in an environment like WordPress, control over those models is limited.
Continue reading “The Headings Hierarchy Challenge” »Good Coding Habits for Accessibility
This is the written version of my talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2014. Watch the video at WordPress.tv. Do you think web accessibility is hard? You’re right. Web Accessibility is hard in the same way that everything else in development is hard: designing and building any perfect product is always tough – even impossible. But getting 90% of the way there is easy. But I’m an advocate for practicality. So don’t set perfection as your goal. Just make things better. […]
Continue reading “Good Coding Habits for Accessibility” »The damage of examples
These are lies we tell: “This is just an example.” “This is a demo, not for use as production code.” No, it’s not. You’re wrong. It may not be code you, the author, would use in production. But as soon as you published it, the likelihood that it will become production code in somebody else’s project skyrockets. And this is inevitably damaging. These examples can be horrible in many ways – reliability, portability, security – and accessibility. In a surprising […]
Continue reading “The damage of examples” »