Category: Accessibility

There are 158 posts filed in Accessibility (this is page 20 of 27).

Quoted

Dear leadership: Get your shit together because this is one of a handfull of people who are actually 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.
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.
Maybe we accessibility folk are a cranky, and at times uncivil bunch. But we wouldn’t be cranky or uncivil if we didn’t have to constantly rehash the basics.
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.

There’s a quick tutorial on custom entry message boxes on the StudipPress blog, and because I think this could be a useful addition to a site for things like affiliate disclosures, I’d like to offer some accessibility considerations.

Look out for color contrast

When adding the example CSS to your theme, make sure the colors for links inside the message, the bottom border color, and the various message color schemes don’t introduce color contrast issues into your theme. You’ll want to make sure there’s appropriate contrast between the message foreground and background, as well as apropriate contrast between the message and the surrounding text. You may also want to include a style guide somewhere on your site explaining the significance of each colored message, and add that link to your custom message.

Make sure the importance of the message isn’t communicated by color alone

When adding your custom entry messages, make sure that the importance of the message isn’t communicated by color alone. You can accomplish this by prefacing each message type with a word or series of words indicating its importance: “Important”, or “very important” or “urgent”, for example. You’ll want to make sure you don’t make these indicators visible to just people who use screen readers, since people who live with color blindness or cognitive disabilities also need to know the information you’re alerting everyone else to.

Custom aentry message boxes can be a useful addition to some types of websites. If you’ve never planned for accessibility before, they can be a great place to start developing that habit, since they’re a simple customization. It doesn’t matter if the rest of your site is accessible at this point. These messages are a great place to start making improvements, and to borrow from the philosophy of Breslov Hasidism, one accessibility improvement paves the way to another, and you should make as many accessibility improvements as you can, even if you can’t improve everything at once. Finally,

The work is not for you to finish nor are you free to desist from it.

Mishnah, Pirkei Avot (Maxims of the Sages) 2:15-16