Current status: Banging on the Twentytwenty theme with all the screen readers and helping @whiskeydragon1 set up his .org account because he’s also testing. #ScreenReaderTagTeam #AllTheProps #5FTF and we haz some patches coming.

It’s very nice to have someone in real time and not remote or chat-based to bounce ideas off of.

Liked This Feature Should Be Easy by Brent Simmons (inessential.com)

A feature is pretty much never as easy as it seems. The main function of a feature — whether that’s making a https call to a read-it-later service or adding some fairly simple new view — is often the easiest part.

Co-signed: Every single developer on the planet.
Amanda wearing a blue knit cap
Amanda wearing a blue knit cap

I’m spending Contributor day working on some accessibility fixes to the Indieweb Publisher theme, which I will submit as a pull request when done because I need some easy wins if the WordPress accessibility fight is going to continue.

I’m also celebrating Blue Beanie Day early because every day is a good day for web standards.

Read Indieweb Thoughts Post State of the Word by David ShanskeDavid Shanske

It has been a while since I wrote out some thoughts on where the Indieweb is on WordPress. Sitting here, after hearing Matt Mullenweg gave the State of the Word at WordCamp US, and after I assisting Tantek Çelik in his talk on Taking Back the Web, which was one of the contributing factors to my being at WordCamp US.

#WCUS I’m glad that @RianKinney asked that question regarding accessibility and other policies.

It would be so cool if we could treat as an “everything-is-awesome” moment and not as a must-do.

Problem with that approach was aptly illustrated by Gutenberg being released in an inaccessible state.

I’d like to say I’m surprised we’re apparently still doing this despite $31,000 worth of audit, but I’m not.

Yes, it would be totally awesome if we didn’t have to say “you must” with regard to accessibility, but unfortunately the makers of the web have consistently demonstrated that that is literally the only way anything gets done.

For the first few years of my career as an accessibility practitioner, I worked on a series of projects whose final reports heavily focused on only the positive, including asking testers with disabilities to talk about what they liked, even on seriously inaccessible sites.

That approach wasn’t just partially ineffective, it was one hundred percent ineffective.

Absolutely none of the sites reported on were fixed, or even improved.

Those sites are still broken.

That’s what happens when you spend your time objecting to accessibility must-dos because they’re must-dos instead of realizing that, yes Matt, there really are things that developers and designers have consistently demonstrated they will not do unless you basically force them to do those things.

All of this also goes for privacy and codes of conduct.

Why do we have to keep saying this?