Amanda Rush

I’m working on a site for a client that includes e-commerce functionality. Since they have to ship physical goods, and are using Stripe already, and since they don’t want to bring in another outside service that they have to pay monthly for to handle their shopping cart, I’ve selected WooCommerce as the overarching plugin to handle most of the e-commerce. Most of the e-commerce sites I’ve done over the last couple of years have included third-party shopping carts, and so WooCommarce itself hasn’t figured much in my workflow, and I was expecting this experience to contain just as much unpleasantness with regard to accessibility as it did a year ago when I last looked seriously at WooCommerce.

I am very pleasantly surprised, delighted, and pleased to report that Automattic has been working on the accessibility of WooCommerce since they first acquired WooThemes a year ago. It’s got a ways to go, (especially since Select II is involved), but there’s definite improvement here. They’re using Aria in a few cases where necessary due to some custom controls, and they’re using it properly. I believe Automattic deserves praise for this, and encouragement to keep up the good work. Making WooCommerce accessible is going to be a long, hard slog, and I’m very glad to see things heading in the right direction. So keep up the great work Automatticians, and I’ll be cheering you on every step of the way.

Anyone who has ever used GitHub with a screen reader knows how painful it can be. This makes contributing to, or even reporting bugs to, projects hosted on the service difficult, and there are a lot of those projects that are large and popular and that could definitely use the help when it comes to their accessibility issues.

Luckily, as long as you’re using Firefox or Chrome, (sorry Internet Explorer users, no help for you), There’s a solution for this problem.

Enter Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey,(and its Chrome equivalent, Tampermonkey), allows you to run user-created scripts in your browser so that you can change the way a website behaves. This includes making it more accessible.

[Tweet “Greasemonkey is like Smart Web except you don’t have to pay for an SMA to get access.”]

Wait, are you saying website creators don’t have to make their sites accessible?

Absolutely not. What I am saying is that when you have no control over whether or not a website like GitHub is accessible, and you have no choice but to use said website, Greasemonkey is the next best option.

Installing Greasemonkey

To install Greasemonkey, navigate to the tools menu by pressing alt+t. Then, arrow down to addons. Alternatively, you can press ctrl+shift+a to open the addons manager. Next,tab to the list view and make sure “get add-ons” is selected. After this,tab to the edit field type “Greasemonkey” in the field and press enter.

Once you press enter, you can either tab to the list of add-ons and select the one you want to install, or tab through the sort buttons and sort the results accordingly. Once you’re in the list of add-ons, arrow to the one you want to install and then tab to the “install” button and press enter or space.

You’ll need to restart Firefox for the Greasemonkey add-on to take effect. You can restart when prompted or restart later.

Make GitHub more accessible

Once you’ve installed Greasemonkey, install the Greasemonkey script for GitHub by Jamie Teh of NVDA fame. As long as you have Greasemonkey installed, you can press enter on the link to the GitHub repository and Greasemonkey will happily install it. It will ask you if you’re sure, warn you about how user scripts can do bad things, but this one’s fine so go ahead and install it.

The GitHub site is magically a lot less painful

Once you have this script installed, the GitHub website becomes a lot easier to use with a screen reader. This is a tool you definitely have to have in your toolkit if you’re doing anything with GitHub, regardless of whether or not you’re using it to host your own repositories. If it makes your life easier, consider a donation to NVAccess.

Advice for maintainers of popular open source projects
This talk from this year’s WordCamp Europe is something that’s worth looking at even if you’re not the maintainer of a popular open source project. A lot of what’s here is also good advice for contributors, especially long-time ones, and I think the whole thing is valuable reading especially for free software/open source projects within the accessibility space in general and the adaptive technology space in particular. Compared to the spread of open source in general, the adoption of open source within the accessibility space is still in its infancy, and it has some domain-specific hurtles that have to be overcome. I’m thinking of all the patents and trademarks related to this industry here. I personally believe that accessibility-related materials and tools should be free software or Creative-Commons licensed by default, but I can also understand at least in some cases why the risk is deemed to be too high by some creators. And because I’m reasonably certain that explaining why I don’t believe it’s OK in other cases would ignite a ton of controversy, and I don’t have time to deal with a lot of that this week, I’ll refrain from doing so. If you’re really interested, you can ask me privately.
When your website is accessible, all users can access your content no matter their abilities. Visually-impaired users can visit your website using a screen reader. Those who can’t, (or prefer not to), use a mouse can navigate your site using a keyboard or other input device. Some accessibility features might also improve your SEO. When your site is inaccessible, research shows you could be excluding up to 20 percent of your users. This talk for all skill levels will review tools and techniques you can use to test and improve your site’s accessibility.

This talk by Rachel Carden at this year’s WordCamp Miami. Click here to view the presentation slides. If you’re using a screen reader to view the slides, navigate to the title of the talk at heading level three and read from there.

WordPress updates are a very important part of any WordPress site’s upkeep. They ensure that you can take advantage of the latest features WordPress has to offer, a lot of which are accessibility enhancements. WordPress updates also help you decrease the risk of your site being compromised. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the WordPress updates screen and show you how to keep WordPress and your themes and plugins up-to-date while using a screen reader.

The WordPress Updates screen

To get to the WordPress Updates screen, navigate to the “dashboard” section of the WordPress administration menu and press enter on “Updates”. The first heading on this screen is WordPress updates. navigate to that, because once you’ve landed on this screen, the administration menu won’t be important again until you’re done updating.

Last checked on

WordPress will let you know when it last checked for updates. There are two occasions when it will do this: when you first load this screen, and, in the background, twice a day.

Check again

After WordPress tells you the last time it checked for updates, you have the opportunity to manually check again. Most of the time, this isn’t necessary, but if you have a lot of themes and plugins installed, or you’re running a huge multisite network, or you haven’t made it a point to update in a long time, you may need to do this. Either way, checking again won’t hurt.

If you haven’t updated in a while, don’t feel bad

While I’m on the subject of site owners who haven’t updated in a while, I want to pause to let you know that you shouldn’t feel bad for doing this. At least not in the sense that you might be the only one putting off updating. Roughly thirty-six percent of sites running WordPress are running the latest version as of this writing. The statistics for popular plugins are worse. Sites running the latest version of Jetpack come in at almost forty percent of the total.

I’m by no means saying that this is a good thing. I am saying that you shouldn’t beat yourself up necessarily because you’re not updating regularly. I will caution, however, that you should make this a regular practice. It’s part of running any website, (powered by WordPress or not), and out-of-date themes and plugins account for just over fifty percent of hacked WordPress sites.

So if you’ve been putting off your WordPress updates, don’t beat yourself up for doing that. Start updating instead.

Getting back to the technical part of the update process, the next thing you’ll see, wrapped in a level-two heading, is a very short status report on your current version of WordPress. WordPress will either tell you you have the latest version installed, or that there is a new version available. Under this heading, wrapped in a list element, you have two options depending on whether or not you have the latest version already installed, or need to install it.

If you have the latest version installed, you have the opportunity to redownload WordPress either automatically or manually. You can either press the “Redownload WordPress” button, or press enter on the link to download the latest zip. If you don’t have the latest version installed, the “Redownload WordPress” button is instead a “Download now” button, and doesn’t say anything about the version number.

Updating plugins

The next section on this screen is the “Plugins” section. It contains two “Update plugins” buttons, and a table that contains a checkbox for each plugin that has an update, as well as a “select all” checkbox. Although you can check the “select all” box and update all plugins at once, best practice is to update them one at a time. this is so that, if anything goes wrong during the update process, you can remove the plugin that caused the problem and continue updating the rest. While WordPress will do its best to make sure that a broken plugin doesn’t break your site by deactivating it when it fails, it’s best to get in the habit of updating plugins one at a time, because you’ll definitely want to do this for themes.

Once you start the update process, WordPress will output status messages within a frame. It will tell you that the update process is starting, and, if you haven’t activated the “show details” link, will give you an overview of how things are going: either the update succeeds or fails.

First, WordPress will enable maintenance mode. Maintenance Mode is a WordPress core feature that suspends access and functions during updates and installations. These updates require some backend processes to stop for a short period of time (usually seconds), so the first thing WordPress does when starting the update process is put your site in maintenance mode by creating a file, .maintenance, to alert front end users and administrators who are not already logged into the install that updates  are happening. During the WordPress update process, if everything goes smoothly, the file is deleted and the site goes back to normal.

The next part of the status message lets you know which plugin is being updated, which number it is among the plugins that are being updated, and whether or not the update was successful. Once the update is complete, you’ll see a message letting you know the update completed successfully, and you’ll then be presented with a choice: Go to the “plugins” section of your administration screens or return to the WordPress updates screen and continue installing updates.

I usually never go to the “Plugins” screen when I’m updating because there are almost always more updates to install. So I’ll return to the WordPress updates screen instead. But nothing’s wrong with going to the plugins screen if you want to check on things.

A detailed look at a plugin update

If you activate the “Show Details” link within this frame, you’ll see how a plugin update happens. First, WordPress downloads the latest zipped copy of the plugin from the plugins repository. It then unpacks the update and installs the latest version. Next, it removes the old version of the plugin, and, if everything completes successfully, it finally lets you know the update completed successfully and gives you the choice to go to the “Plugins” screen or to return to the WordPress updates screen.

Rinse and repeat

To update the rest of the plugins you have installed, simply repeat these steps. Make sure to update all the plugins you have installed, not just the active ones. Better yet, delete the plugins you’re not using. By doing this, you can ensure that you have less updates to install, and you decrease the risk of your site being hacked.

Updating Themes

Updating themes works pretty much the same way updating plugins does, complete with the same section layout, information within a frame, maintenance mode, ETC. When you’re updating your themes, run each update one at a time. For inactive themes you can get away with running them all at once, but for the active theme, if something goes wrong with the update, you will bring upon yourself the”White Screen of Death”. This is fixable, but if you update all your themes at once, and if you have a lot of them installed, (yes, it happens), and further if you don’t remember which theme you have active, finding the problem theme can become a real chore.

In this tutorial, I’ve shown you around the WordPress Updates screen, and I’ve walked you through the WordPress updates process. By following this tutorial step by step, keeping your WordPress site up-to-date should be a more familiar process. The next time you need to update WordPress and your plugins and themes, feel free to have this handy for reference.

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This post appears in its original form on Torque, but there have been a lot of changes in the direction of accessibility since this was first written, so it’s time for an updated version. In the original version, I focused on Jaws for Windows alone, while in this version I’ll include the Jaws information as well as NVDA-specific tips.

When it comes to accessibility and usability with screen readers, WordPress has made some enormous strides in the right direction over the past several versions.
Nonetheless, there are some techniques screen reader users can use to find what they want and get things done quickly within WordPress.

Find what you want and skip the rest

When you log into your Menu Humility plugin. It ensures that any settings page stays in the “settings” submenu of the WordPress administration menu. It still works on current versions of WordPress.

Collapse the menu if you’re not using it

The last thing I’ll usually do to increase productivity is to collapse the administration menu when I’m not using it. While I can navigate using headings, I’ll collapse the menu so that, when a page reloads, the screen reader doesn’t read all the links. Stopping speech with the “control” key is always an option, but keeping the menu collapsed and expanding it only when I need it is one less keystroke.

Tame admin notices

Admin notices can get out of hand incredibly quickly, because they’re often used by themes and plugins in ways that were never intended by WordPress. Admin notices don’t have their own heading either, and they show up on every administration screen of your WordPress site. To keep them under control, you’ll want to install a plugin called Dobby. This plugin takes all your admin notices and hides them behind a reveal button so you can deal with them at your convenience. Each notice is given a color code, which won’t be useful for most screen reader users. But hiding all the admin notices behind one button is useful in and of itself, and I recommend that you install this plugin along with Menu Humility before you install any other plugin or theme on your site.

The WordPress dashboard can become very cluttered very quickly as you start adding plugins. Clutter can be manageable if you spend all your time in WordPress, but since you probably don’t, using these tips will make working with your WordPress site less time-consuming, and therefore, less of a hassle.