For many years, I’ve seen repeated – and have myself repeated – the idea that an accessible website is not more expensive. That idea comes with a notable caveat. That caveat, to sum it up, is that it is not more accessible to build an accessible website from scratch than it is to build an inaccessible site from scratch. Building from scratch. When was the last time you built a website from scratch? What does it mean, in 2022, to […]
Continue reading “The real added costs of accessibility” »Tag: a11y
Don’t judge progress by the number of open issues
Recently, I’ve seen more than one person in the accessibility community sharing Tweets about the number of accessibility issues in the Gutenberg repository. The increase in issues over the last few years is presented to show that WordPress is not considering accessibility. Specifically, I’m referring to comments by Adrian Roselli & Dennis Lembree: There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize the accessibility of Gutenberg. Progress on accessibility has been inconsistent at best. This is heavily influenced by the lack […]
Continue reading “Don’t judge progress by the number of open issues” »The Dangerous Path of the Accessibility Overlay
Without naming any names – because it doesn’t really matter which tool it is – an accessibility overlay is a tool that fundamentally harms the future of web site accessibility. The nature of accessibility testing is to expose issues to a human being who can then act on those issues. An accessibility overlay, by nature, avoids exposing what problems it has addressed to a human being. This is a crucial difference that has a long-term impact on the accessibility of […]
Continue reading “The Dangerous Path of the Accessibility Overlay” »Reminder: Accessibility can’t be solved automatically
The other day, Mike Gifford shared a post from Small Business Trends that talked about how free accessibility plugins cause problems for small business, in which my plug-in WP Accessibility was cited. In that message, he expressed that he was sorry to see my plug-in lumped in with other shady web site accessibility toolbars. But, in all honesty, I’m OK with that. WP Accessibility is definitely different from most of these other so-called accessibility toolbars, in that I’ve worked hard […]
Continue reading “Reminder: Accessibility can’t be solved automatically” »WordPress 5.0 Releases Today. What should you do?
The hubbub surrounding Gutenberg (soon to be known only as “the block editor”) has been intense since early October. For the purpose of this post, I want to put aside discussion of the process that lead to the release. Instead, I’m going to make my own specific recommendations for what users of WordPress should do. First, this is based on the assumption that you will stay on WordPress. Unless you have a pressing need to change content management systems, I […]
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