In which I potentially piss a bunch of people off, but oh well.
As I browsed through work Twitter this morning, I came across this.
In case you don’t want to read the entire thread, or the embed gives you fits, the gist is this:
UX conference: Hey, we’d like submissions from ladies of marginalized groups.
Very polite accessibility professional: I’d love to help you out, but am unable to complete your form with a screen reader. Here’s a free alternative platform you can use.
UX conference: So sorry, maybe next time.
When pressed, the UX con asserts that, since their link has been spread so far already, and since they’re volunteers, they can’t do anything about it for now.
You had to go there, didn’t you?
I am loath to call any small outfit that doesn’t get accessibility right lazy, because I know that resources can be tight and knowledge is often limited. But this is an example of pure laziness and unwillingness to make even the slightest change. Being volunteer-driven is no excuse. The overwhelming majority of WordPress contributors are volunteers, and yet we’re working on the accessibility of our platform. Our link has been spreading for the last thirteen years, and yet we’re working on the accessibility of our platform. The problem here isn’t lack of resources, or that this UX con’s organizing team is made up of volunteers. Hell, every single WordCamp’s organizers are volunteers, and yet we somehow manage to make sure that inclusion of the groups this con is asking for submissions from, plus people with disabilities, is part and parcel of every single one of our events.
This isn’t about resources, it’s about priorities. I will be the first one to yell at accessibility folks when I believe things are going crazy. But you don’t get to trumpet your inclusion creds while blatantly excluding people with disabilities. That signals that every other effort you’re making towards inclusion of marginalized groups is a hollow one, and only serves as a cover-your-ass mechanism. It’s not like anyone’s asking for the con’s entire CMS to be rewritten. All that’s being asked is that you create an accessible form so that you can get the submissions you so desperately desire. But if you’re not willing to make your form accessible, an effort which might take you an hour tops, assuming that this is a complex form, (which it’s probably not), you might as well just say that your conference is for the privileged only. At least if you did that, no one would waste their time trying to help you out.
http://wordpress.tv/2016/08/26/trisha-salas-accessibility-tips-tricks-and-best-practices-for-plugin-developers/
This talk by Trisha Salas, who is a member of the WordPress Accessibility Team, and currently works for Modern Tribe, helping them improve the accessibility of their WordPress products and services, is an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to improve the accessibility of their WordPress plugins. Although it’s well-known in the WordPress space that themes can be improved with regard to accessibility, and that accessibility ready WordPress themes can improve the accessibility of the sites they’re used to build, WordPress plugins haven’t gotten as much accessibility love. The reasons for this are varied, and deserve a separate post of their own, but fortunately, this is starting to change.
If you haven’t tried to make your WordPress plugin accessible before, this can seem a daunting challenge. Trisha’s talk will give you some quick pointers that are easy to start implementing, as well as demonstrate how Modern Tribe is tackling the accessibility of their WordPress products.
The open web continues to remain important, regardless of how much ink it gets. But every once in a while, something happens, and that event throws a light on why the open web is so important.
At the end of June, Dennis Cooper, (an experimental artist), found that his blog, including an entire decade’s worth of his content, was deleted by Google. I currently have a client who wrote an article for the Huffington Post and wanted to highlight that article on his newly rebuilt website. It’s gone. Not on the Huffington Post, not in Google’s search results anywhere, not on archive.org. Completely gone.
If you care about your content, on any level, (and surely you do, because you took the time to create it), don’t post it on a closed platform alone. Not Facebook, not Twitter, not AudioBoom, not SoundCloud, or any number of closed platforms that have come and gone over the years. If you want to post links to it on these platforms for the exposure, fine. But by all means, don’t turn over ownership of content you’ve created to anyone who’s not you. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when you post your content solely on closed platforms like Medium and the like. You’re getting exposure in exchange for content ownership, and, (depending on the terms of service for each platform), you’re handing over the usage rights, and you’re granting these platforms the right to use your content, your hard work, however they like. And it’s not their job to keep your content safe by backing it up for you.
Yes, hosting your content yourself has its inconveniences. You have to work for exposure. You have to learn how your self-hosted platform, (like WordPress or Drupal), works, so that you can add content. But at the end of the day, that content remains yours, and you control who does what with it. So if you’re willing to spend time creating that content, spend the extra time ensuring that you own it, and can therefore safeguard it.
WordPress’s blogging features are the reason WordPress was created in the first place. It started out as a blogging platform. It has since grown into a full-fledged content management system, and is fast becoming a platform on which applications can be built. Both the CMS use case and the applications use case present the possibility that a site owner might not need any of WordPress’s blogging features. While I think most sites have a use for a blog, (you need a way to keep your visitors up-to-date with what’s going on with your business or application, after all), the ability to disable blogging features until they’re desired is something that’s been lacking from the WordPress ecosystem for a long time.
As with everything else, there’s a plugin for that
With the Disable Blogging plugin, you now have the ability to disable all of WordPress’s blogging features non-destructively. This means that, if down the line you decide you want to add a blog to your site after you’ve disabled all the blogging features, you can do so by simply deactivating the plugin.
What features does it disable?
The plugin disables the following features by hiding them as long as it’s active.
- • Posts and everything related to them
- Comments and everything related to them
- Comments from pages
- Blog related widgets
- Pingbacks, Trackbacks, and XML-RPC header links
- Biographical info and Admin Color schemes on the user profile page
- Press This Bookmarklet
- Posts via email
- Howdy, help tabs, and query strings from static resources
Think of this as the nuclear option if you want to do away with blogging on your site completely.
There are two things that immediately stand out during testing. The first is that logging in takes users to their profile page instead of the Dashboard. Second, the Dashboard and the link to it are gone. If you’re used to seeing the WordPress dashboard, running WordPress with it disabled can be a jarring experience, and, if you use this on a client’s site, and you’ve shown them how to update the site before adding this plugin, you’ll want to explain to them what they should expect before you enable this.
The WordPress dashboard serves a useful purpose, especially on sites where you need to quickly glance at things like e-commerce data, so I would only recommend using this in situations where your client isn’t depending on getting easy access to their data snapshots. It’s not that it’s not possible for them to navigate to the various sections of the administration panel to find their various stats, but it can be seen to add a layer of complexity.
If you’re looking for some user testing data before you make the leap, check out Jeff’s post on WordPress Tavern to get a sense of what it might be like to activate this plugin on your site.
All of this notwithstanding, if you know that, (at least for now), you don’t want a blog on your site, this is a good option that allows you to disable it until it’s needed.
Good content is the foundation of any website’s success. It doesn’t matter how awesome your product or service is, or how much of a difference it can make in the lives of others. If you don’t tell anyone about it, clearly and while demonstrating that you have an excellent grasp of your subject and its audience, you will not make a sale.
There’s a lot of writing advice on the web, and it can be hard to find out which advice is best for your situation. If you’re looking for a place to start, I would recommend the following from Copyblogger on writing with power and authority.
I would also recommend studying their archives. There’s a lot of free, actional content you can use to build your own content library, and you can use all of this material regardless of how successful you are right now, or regardless of how you measure success. All it takes is a serious time investment on your part, but if you’re trying to run a business and make sales, you already knew that you have to invest a lot of time and hard work.
