Author: Amanda Rush

I’m really, really glad to see that Deque Systems is participating in/holding a hackathon at this year’s WordCamp US contributor day along with the Accessibility Team and those on the core team who are familiar with WordPress’s testing environment, in order to integrate aXe-Core into our core. Can we call this inception yet? I use Tenon, (a competing tool), and of course I’m a Tenon fan, but I also really like aXe-core. I just find it harder to use as a screen reader user trying to fight with Firefox’s developer tools, and Chrome’s developer tools are less accessible than Firefox’s. I’m still working out some last minute details to hopefully make it to WCUS this year so I can participate. I don’t know much about WordPress’s tests but would love to help in person any way I can. Plus, it’s WordCamp. This is an incredibly positive step forward for both WordPress as well as Gutenberg, and nothing makes me happier than to see it. This is the starting point on the road to making Gutenberg one of the most awesome things on the planet in my opinion: a block editor and eventually a complete site editor with drag-and-drop capabilities that everyone can use.
Dear #WordPress leadership: Get your shit together because this is one of a handfull of people who are actually #a11y experts who are also skilled React devs and your squandering WordPress’s hard-won rep on a11y for an arbitrary deadline is a damn shame.
I clicked on the link for Jeremy’s presentation, only to be directed to his book on this subject, which I will promptly be buying. I spent a little time looking through the A Book Apart catalog and didn’t realize that had so much cool stuff. And yes, as a user, I would really appreciate not being annoyed on a constant basis by websites I’ve given permission to notify me. I gave Slack permission to do that on the old computer and that was one of the first things I didn’t set up on the new one.
The first thing I can tell you that may help you solve part of the problem you’re experiencing is that, unless you have WordPress’s wpautop function overridden, you do not need to add paragraph tags to your code. YOu simply need to separate paragraphs by pressing the enter key twice, as you would in a word processor. If you’re like me and you despise the fact that WordPress picks on the humble paragraph tag, you can disable it using either by filtering wpautop or by using a plugin like Toggle wpautop. To add your syndication sources, (at least for things that aren’t yet supported by the Syndication Links plugin), I would recommend adding some custom buttons to your editor. YOu can do that by using a plugin called Tiny MCE Advanced. YOu can also do it with code but if you’re just trying to get something done quickly and you don’t feel like writing yourself a custom functionality plugin for the buttons, this will do it without all the trouble.
Current status: About to piss a bunch of people off on the NFB Jobs mailing list by replying to a message which advocates for a weekly salary and annonymity for blind people participating in the drive-by demand letter racket.
Dear WordPress. I get it. Everybody’s tired of hearing about Gutenberg, and it sucks when you’ve worked so hard on something, only to have a ton of people harshly criticize it. I get it. For Matt and the Gutenberg team, Gutenberg is your baby, and right now it seems like all of us are calling your baby ugly, dismissing all the hard work you’ve put in. Personally, I would love nothing better than to say only positive things about Gutenberg, and to talk about how much better it is than Squarespace’s or Wix’s editor, just to name a few. I would love to not participate in what’s being dismissed as WordPress drama because I, like you, hate drama. Unfortunately I do not have that privilege. I do not have the privilege of simply ignoring Gutenberg’s accessibility problems, because when it becomes the default editor those accessibility problems will directly effect my livelihood. Unless the Classic Editor plugin is per-user and per-post/post type, and unless it seemlessly converts back and forth between Gutenberg blocks and current content, it’s not even close to a workable solution. And that’s not even addressing the fact that, essentially, people with disabilities are being forced to wait on the sidelines again because a break-neck development pace and reliance on volunteers and having a shiny new thing to show off at WordCamp US were more important than whether or not WordPress demonstrated true leadership and did something truly innovative by releasing the first and only block editor that everyone can use no matter their physical ability or technical expertise. OK, so you’ve added some keyboard shortcuts and you do some really awesome things to ensure that what you deliver is an accessibility improvement upon what’s come before in this space. That’s great, but it’s not a first. Wix already does this and has done so for about a year. I mean, I can’t use their editor anymore since they just couldn’t handle attributing WordPress for that awesome update they had for a minute, but hey, they added some keyboard shortcuts and any new site starts with an accessible base and they did it all by themselves so that’s an improvement. I suppose when you go from zero accessibility to partial accessibility you have no choice but to call that an improvement, but that’s not what WordPress is doing. WordPress is improving accessibility on the front end and people with disabilities are picking up the tab. Instead of doing something truly amazing and wonderful and being the first to create a block editor that has complete drag-and-drop capabilities plus the ability for anyone who doesn’t use a mouse or who uses some kind of assistive technology to have complete control over what they create, WordPress is merely copying its competitors when it comes to releasing something that’s inaccessible and then promising to fix it later. Geocities promised to make their page builder accessible. It never happened. Google, same thing. Squarespace, they’re still making us vote on it I think, but I suppose they should maybe get points for at least being honest about the fact they really don’t give a damn. Wix resisted for years and finally started to get around to it, but they made all kinds of promises too and it’s a year later and we’re still waiting for an editor we can use. The list goes on and on and on. Anybody who’s been on the web longer than two seconds knows this song because it’s been played so often. Forgive me if I don’t exactly take promises to fix Gutenberg’s accessibility problems as anything other than promises in the dark. So yeah WordPress, I know WordPress drama sucks. I’d love to return you to your regularly scheduled program. But the WordPress I adopted as my home and as my family is better than Wix or Squarespace or Google or Geocities and I believe that it is still capable of doing great things that will shake the foundations of the web, and passing that up for the sake of speed development and a new shiny is missing an opportunity that you can never take advantage of again.
Blind people, I am not having your excuses for why you can’t make the things you create accessible to all disability groups today, especially if you constantly flag accessibility fails on the part of others. If @BlindBargains can manage it, so can you. If you create a podcast, then it needs transcription. If you run a website, it needs skiplinks. It needs images with alternative text. These things are part of accessibility in particular and inclusive design in general, and you cannot complain about the accessibility fails of others, (hashtag a11yFail), and then skip the parts you don’t want or that are too hard or too inconvenient.
Dear #indieweb I am going to do my very best to not flood Indienews with #ID24 web-related talks but you have no idea how difficult this is going to be. We’re only four hours into a twenty-four hour conference and there’s been a ton of really, really good web-related stuff here.
This Is For Everyone is a talk I will definitely be revisiting, along with all the other talks given so far as part of this year’s Inclusive Design 24, because it’s jam-packed with information, including some very useful statistics. It’s a really good overview of accessibility at a high level, and is a great way to kick off a conference whose talks go into quite a bit of detail about how to make the web more accessible, complete with examples. Hint Indieweb folks, given your love of POSH, (plain old semantic HTML for the rest), you’re already on the right track to an accessible web, because semantic HTML is the foundation of everything accessible.
I can remember a time when the #WordPress customizer was off limits if you used a screen reader. I’m playing with it now and even though I know there’s more work to do I’m so proud to see how far it’s come. And no, I’m not praising my own work, I’ve had nothing to do with it.
#ID24, (otherwise known as Inclusive Design 24), is happening again next week, and the sensible part of my brain is saying “No, really, you shouldn’t stay awake for twenty-four hours and it doesn’t matter how good the talks are going to be because you are not in your twenties anymore”, and the rest of my brain is saying “This schedule is awesome and it will be so much fun to participate on the social medias with everybody and bring some IndieWeb goodness and then shove it all to your Facebook page”. I think I know which part is going to end up winning. I need to take Noter Live for a spin because I haven’t done so yet on the new computer, because I haven’t done that yet and live tweeting the whole conference a couple of years ago was fun.
Now that I’m familiarizing myself with this theme, (I tested it before it was bundled into core as part of the WordPress Accessibility Team but haven’t given it much of a look since), I’m seeing that we do have two menu locations. Getting back to my comments re: including the link always in the post, I looked at your reply to my tweet on your site and noticed that you included the tweet. For some reason I was thinking the original link would be pulled in even though it’s not displayed in the tweet, but I’m just going to blame that on not enough caffeine. 🙂 So I will go ahead and change that setting. I also need to add and/or rearrange some categories on this site while I’m at it.
I need to write some text for the front page, and link the various post kinds in the menu. And seriously Facebook pages, there’s a lot of hate going on for microformats 2 and you really need to address that because it’s just not cool.
This is a really good post to use as a guide if you’re a blind person trying to work with the Twentysixteen WordPress default theme. It walks through the different steps you can take to customize the theme for your site, without using code. It also gives some detail about the various color schemes that come packaged with the theme.