December 2015

Two years later.

Source: The HTTP 451 Error Code for Censorship Is Now an Internet Standard

The idealist in me wants to think this will do some good for users. Sensorship is not a good thing, for too many reasons to mention, and since net neutrality is on the chopping block and it’ll only be a matter of time before it’s completely gone, this seems as good a way as any to fight back.

As an aside, being in favor of net neutrality should not be a partisan issue. Users, including those who swallow whatever talking points they’re fed on the subject, especially by those who refer to themselves as conservatives but aren’t really. The only groups who will benefit from a lack of net neutrality are those who are interested in silencing voices. In other words, sensors. And sensors serve no one but themselves, or whoever’s paying their bills.

This post is in response to this one, and you should go read it first before reading the rest of this one.

We’ve probably all heard a phrase that goes something along these lines.

Keep your personal life and problems private and out of your business dealings.

That’s not an exact quote, but it’s definitely a skill that you learn as you go into business. Never show your weaknesses, because they erode client trust. If your clients see that you’re having problems, and that you’re public about them, they’re less likely to work with you. If your clients know that you have any kind of mental illness, or physical illness, they’re afraid it’s going to effect your work, and they’re less likely to hire you.

This is a mindset that has become ingrained within just about every type of business community, and until I became a part of the WordPress community, I thought it was just the rules of the road. Since I joined the WordPress community, I have come to view it as dangerous, destructive, and the ultimate killer of productivity.

I have come to believe that wellness, (shlemah, completeness or complete personal well-being), makes up at least half of what we would consider productivity, and is the first priority over everything else, including skillset or the amount of tasks you complete in a day for a project or projects.

This is hard to admit, because it means that I’ve had to unlearn a whole lot. I’m still not done unlearning, and I’m definitely not done implementing what I’ve relearned. I’m still working on that and trying to figure out the logistics.

But at this point, I believe that nothing is more important than wellness. Not personal glory, not deadlines, not accessibility, not good code, nothing.

It has become a key factor in picking clients or projects. Whether or not a client cares about their own wellness enough isn’t something I have control over. Whether or not I make room in my busy schedule for my own wellness is something I do have control over.

I’m not posting this to preach at anyone so much as for personal accountability. I’m going to need the help of the WordPress community to figure all this out beyond the first step. There will be financial implications to this. To be honest, there’s not enough money to go around in the first place, and I’m pretty certain this is going to effect at least one of my off and on client relationships negatively, and it’s the one that usually pays the most to boot.

Also, I’m going to have to start charging for every piece of accessibility advice I give. As much as I love helping the community achieve accessibility goodness, that comes at a cost to me, and if I help with your theme or plugin, even if you’re giving it away for free, I’ll still have to charge for that help. I’m pretty sure most of you can’t afford my ideal hourly rate of $200 per hour, so I’ll be testing out some lower rates to see what works, as well as testing out some sort of pay-by-the-minute setup. Clarity won’t work for this, as the interface is almost completely unusable for both myself and any other clients who are visually impaired and use a screen reader. So I’ll be building something with Gravity Forms and charging a minimum amount for a minimum amount of minutes.

I’d like to hope that no one in the WordPress community takes this personally. Because trust me, it’s not. And we’re going to need to work together to figure out a rate that this particular market will bear. Most of the money that’s made in the accessibility community is made from Fortune 50 or Fortune 500 companies, and the rates are determined accordingly. This community is obviously not the Fortune 50 or Fortune 500, and yet there needs to be a solution for the little guy or little business who cares deeply about doing the right thing and making their products and software accessible, and yet can’t afford Fortune 50 or Fortune 500 rates for practical advice.

So all of this, I hope, will be a journey we can go on together, hopefully creating something that works for the little guy, gets the right thing done, and makes the world a better place for millions of people.

Now to publish this and see what the fall-out is.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t go completely wrong. 🙂

There’s been some discussion of late around who the typical WordPress user is, and what they can and cannot learn. I’d like to take this discussion in a slightly different direction, because I think that asking what a WordPress user can and cannot learn is the wrong question. In my experience, it comes down to what WordPress users will and won’t learn.

Before I go any further down this path, I’ll point out that this has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with frustration on the part of users by a barrier of entry that is perceived to be high. In some cases, it actually is, but in others, it’s a high barrier due to a number of factors, some of which are completely outside WordPress’s control and other factors that are within the control of those who are building the tools meant for average users, both within the WordPress project itself and the surrounding community.

None of the data I have is based on research. It’s only anecdotal, based on my years of teaching blind people how to use their technology, and how to use WordPress in particular, through the Cisco Academy for the Vision Impaired WordPress and CMS Fundamentals course.

This course aims to teach users how to build a basic website with WordPress’s built-in features, along with some plugins recommended based on ease of use with screen readers, and accessibility-ready themes. During its first successful run, some code was covered, but I found that my students could not tolerate the extra work involved in using code to make what they perceived were simple customizations.

For me, the code bit was easy, and I figured that since it was literally “I’m going to give you some things to copy and paste, and tell you where to put them in your theme’s files,” I thought it would be easy for my students too.

It turns out I was wrong, because my students weren’t, and still aren’t, willing to tolerate the extra work involved, no matter how little it actually is.

Having a good understanding of what users will and won’t tolerate when it comes to WordPress and the websites they build with it is critical to the further success of WordPress down the line. If we tell users that WordPress is a piece of cake to use, then it has to be so. We can’t expect that users who are not developers are going to do things like use their browser’s development tools to troubleshoot an issue. By way of illustration, every single support call I take, (and yes, they’re calls, as in on Skype or on the phone, because the type of user I deal with on a regular basis considers user forums too high of a barrier to entry when it comes to getting support), involves me using my developer tools on their site to see if what they’re reporting to me is actually occurring, or to get a better handle on what’s actually going on before I start walking them through how to solve a particular problem.

WordPress can be powerful, or it can be easy. And I think it’s time we pick one of those options. making something powerful means that it has to become more complex. Once it starts becoming more complex, it’s no longer easy. I think that, at least for wordPress, we may need to abandon the “easy” rhetoric. It’s almost always never true, and if we tell users that something is easy to use, and they find out that in their experience it’s not, they become frustrated and move to another platform like Wix or SquareSpace.

And we shouldn’t be a Wix or Squarespace knock-off, we should be WordPress.

I was browsing through Twitter, and came upon an article I thought might be interesting and thought-provoking reading. Ironically, it’s an article about the moral failure of the computer science community. So I open the page, and I’m reminded of why I have no sympathy for, nor can I empathize much with, online advertisers.

It comes down to the fact that almost all of you aggressively scrolljack.

This goes for ads, as well as those trendy newsletter sign-ups that steal cursor focus away from the content you’re promoting and drop it in your sign-up form or advertisement, like I’m suddenly going to want to stop what I’m doing and do what you want me to do: Buy whatever you’re advertising or sign up for your newsletter.

In order to get back to what I was doing in the first place, (reading your content), I have to resort to the following process.

1. Open the page, press “H” to jump to the headline. Maybe read a couple of lines.
2. Page refreshes, or some other scrolljacking event happens. Get dropped back to the top of the page.
3. Press ctrl+f to bring up the find dialog.
4. Think of a word or phrase which hasn’t occurred multiple times within the content, in order to hit my target on the first shot, and beat the next page refresh or scrolljack.
5. Read the next couple lines.
6. Repeat steps 1 through 5 until I either get to the end of the content, or, depending on how long the content is, quit at some point because I’m tired of repeating myself and I’m frustrated and don’t want to fight with the keyboard, the screen reader, and the browser any longer.

It’s stuff like this that makes people install adblockers. Or turn off JavaScript. Or just not visit your sites and read your content at all, and hence, not buy what you’re selling.

I might be able to empathize with online advertisers if I weren’t trading my own sanity in the process.

The worst part of all this is that it has nothing to do with accessibility, but extremely basic user experience. I’d really like to think it comes down to lack of awareness, but I’d have to engage in a hell of a lot of mental gymnastics to do that. So I have no choice but to chalk it up to a lack of concern for users.

And if I can plainly see that you don’t care about the experience of your users when it comes to something as simple as reading your content, what makes you think I’m going to believe you’ll care more after I’ve purchased your product or signed up for your newsletter?

I’ve been patiently waiting all day, and now I’m taking a break from my pile of work to introduce you to WordPress 4.4, Clifford.

WordPress 4.4 “Clifford”

Feature of note: Responsive Image Support

As of WordPress 4.4, responsive image support is now part of core. Here’s how it works.

If you’re using the the Responsive Images Community Group’s feature plugin, you’ll already be familiar with how WordPress 4.4’s new responsive images support works. That’s because this plugin has been merged into core and, (along with several helper functions and filters for developers to use), is the new responsive images feature. So sites like this beauty lovingly crafted by Prime Access Consulting will continue to enjoy the support for responsive images they’ve always had, except with one less plugin. For sites not running this plugin already, all you’ll need to do is install the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin, because you’ll need to generate the missing medium-large size for all your images. You’ll only need to do this once, and from that point onward, you can uninstall the plugin and rely on WordPress’s automatic handling of your image sizes.

If you’re a user who’s not a developer, or a user who is a developer but doesn’t have the time to dive into all the new responsive images goodness, you can learn how to use WordPress’s new responsive images functionality by reading this post.

And if you are a developer who’s interested in diving into all WordPress has to offer with regard to responsive images, you can learn all about it by reading this post.

Responsive Images in WordPress 4.4

There are, of course, more amazing user-specific and developer-specific features in WordPress 4.4, but this post is getting long and I really have to get back to work. So you can find out more about what WordPress 4.4 has to offer from this post by Brian Krogsgard.

I really do hope you enjoy using WordPress 4.4. I’ve had a ball contributing to it via the WordPress Accessibility Team, and although my name’s not in the credits, (one day soon I will haz the props), I’ll be celebrating with the rest of the WordPress community. Just after I finish all this work. 😛

Over the years, web users of all skill levels have embraced the WordPress platform for its simple user interface, clean aesthetic and customizable design options. The simplicity of WordPress was especially attractive to less-experienced users in its early days. WordPress’s creators set out to democratize publishing by equipping its users with intuitive tools and attractive templates that would permit even the novice blogger to set up and maintain a beautiful website.

However, as WordPress’s feature set has evolved, and as WordPress has entered and become the largest player in the content management system space, the users who first adopted it because of its ease of use are finding that it is no longer easy to use.

WordPress is no longer the simple blogging platform it bagan as. It now runs twenty-five percent of the web, and everyone from bloggers to large enterprises is using it to power their web presence, and, in some cases, their native applications.

As a result, it is difficult for small businesses, who may need more features than the typical SquareSpace or Wicks can provide, but who don’t need WordPress in all its powerful glory, to make sense of everything they’re presented with when they first set up WordPress.

GoDaddy aims to solve this problem by providing a pared-down version of the WordPress administration screens that provide only the features that small businesses and online store owners will find useful.

I have no idea what this is going to mean for the accessibility of the service, or if accessibility has even been considered. I also have no idea how much of the accessibility work that has gone into the WordPress backend has been taken out with these customizations. But it will be interesting to watch how this pans out. WP Easy Mode is only in its first iteration, and GoDaddy is promising that more is yet to come. Let’s hope that accessibility is still in the mix.