On October 9, Juliette Reinders Folmer announced on the core WordPress blog that WordPress 5.3 will use the spread operator. The spread operator was one of the new features made available in PHP 5.6, a version released in 2014.
WordPress abandoned PHP 5.2 – 5.5 with the release of WordPress 5.2. This means the core team can start taking advantage of relatively new features, or at least 5-year-old features. For plugin and theme developers who maintain the same minimum version support as WordPress, they can also start exploring this feature.
Amanda Rush
Finally, reasonably accessible project management.
I have a lot of catching up to do to get in line with the way everyone else manages their projects, but I suspect my life’s about to get a lot easier.
Mmmm fewer spreadsheets and fewer hacky internal applications.
The Accessibility Inspector provides a means to access important information exposed to assistive technologies on the current page via the accessibility tree, allowing you to check what’s missing or otherwise needs attention. This article takes you through the main features of the Accessibility Inspector and how to use it.
As with all Inclusive Design 24 talks, this one will include captions soon after the conference is over.
Marco Zehe:
Marco has worked for Mozilla since 2007, always in the accessibility field. He does quality assurance. He also worked for Freedom Scientific and helped with braille display dev in the early 2000’s.
Accessibility inspector is a new addition to Firefox dev toools, it’s a year old now.
Mozilla wanted to make sure devs could make their sites more accessible without having to download extras.
accessibility inspector allows devs to inspect the accessibility tree as presented to assistive technology users.
Latere versions introduce auditing features to highlight easily solvable problems. Helps devs solve problems and lets them see the problems go away.
Accessibility inspector is inside dev tools beside the HTML inspector. can be turned on in the context menu as well.
Unless you’re a screen reader user, turn on accessibility engine first.
Turn off when not using because it slows down the browser thanks to extra processing. If you turn off for one tab it turns it off for all.
Screen readers can’t accidentally turn off the accessibility engine.
Marco is demoing the tree views of the inspector.
Inspector is fully keyboard accessible.
If you have more than one tool bar on a page make sure that they are labeled and state their purposes. Marco is citing chapter and verse of WCAG.
Another cool visual feature: Accessibility highlight. Use the mouse to highlight and info bar shows complete color contrast for all colors and shows which ones pass.
Mozilla is trying to advance auditing with machine learning. Trying to determine whether or not machine learning can help. Finds patterns for fake elements.
Helps with div soup.
Mozilla wants feedback. Bugzilla, Twitter, public chat facilities.
The inspector can output its results as a json file.
Import resultant json into your tool of choice.
You can use the inspector as a blind/VI person. Sweet! Gonna go play with this now.
The info from the inspector is available on Linux as well, so you’ll get good enough results to not have to worry about switching to Mack/Windows screen readeres.
Marco attempts to avoid Chrome V. Firefox accessibility toools death match. Playing this well.
You can make dynamic changes in the dom inspector and they will be reflected in the accessibility inspector. Seems like this could be great for temporary hacks by screen readers.
Oh hey it’s @aardrian!
Mozilla’s accessibility team heavily collaborates with the other teams. Collaboration is facilitated. WordPress, please take note.
Thanks Marco, this talk was excellent, and I’m looking forward to playing with this.
Users treat their WordPress websites like red-headed step children because people who cobble together themes and plugins while calling themselves building custom websites do stupid, stupid things.
Just because you can do anything you want with WordPress doesn’t mean you should do whatever you want with WordPress, or any other tool for that matter.