In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of lawsuits filed in response to inaccessible websites. As a developer who works primarily with Shopify, I have seen an increase in questions from merchants related to accessibility, some of them from merchants who were facing lawsuits themselves.
As Shopify is popular with small business owners who can’t afford a custom-built store, I began to wonder about the state of Shopify themes. What sort of options were out there for a merchant looking to purchase an existing theme from the theme store, and what could I safely recommend to merchants so they could have an accessible storefront from the beginning? I decided I would conduct some basic accessibility testing of all the themes on the homepage of the theme store to get an overview of what the theme landscape looked like.
Category: Accessibility
There are 158 posts filed in Accessibility (this is page 5 of 27).
You made the accessibility community as a whole a better, stronger place, and for me at least, you were and are the patriarch of the WordPress Accessibility Team. You helped make it a family, and more importantly, you taught me more things that had nothing to do with the technical aspects of web accessibility than I can enumerate.
Thank you for being the person you were and are and always will be, and when my time comes to enter the World to Come, I hope to be able to report to you that every battle for the rights of people like your beloved daughter has been fought and won.
I just had to log into their DNS manager to update a record for a client. I found that the record editing process was extremely accessible which made my job easier.
There are of course still improvements that need to be made to the interface, but I’m glad to see that some accessibility work has been done.
On a related note, WPEngine is promising a new interface with keyboard accessibility, which is also a welcome improvement.
I’m looking forward to that.
Late in November, I published a personal opinion on the state of Gutenberg accessibility. Today, I’d like to give an introduction to Gutenberg from a screen reader user perspective.
I still have issues with this whole Gutenberg process, and my recent criticisms regarding leadership and project-level accessibility prioritization still hold.
But this quick guide to using Gutenberg with a screen reader gives me a place to start, and at least allows me to work with the thing, and even to think about experimenting with some things on a development version of this site.
So, thank you tons Marco, I probably owe you a keg at this point. 🙂
Google wants to speed up the web, and it has a plan:
For many, reading on the mobile web is a slow, clunky and frustrating experience – but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere. Right off the bat, if you use the AMP project page to get a sense of how capable Google is of doing this right, you may become a little deflated. For starters, it fails on the accessibility front, lacking alt text on images, a lang attribute on the element, controls on its opening video, and sufficient text contrast. It also seems to demonstrate just why we want faster pages by itself weighing in at 44MB over 124 requests, taking nearly 6 seconds to load.
If a client insists on it, I’ll do my best to convince them otherwise, but if they continue to insist I’ll of course implement it because pick your battles (TM).
This has turned out to be a great resource for keeping up with the flaws of AMP though.
WordPress and Gutenberg project leaders: You want WordPress to be a platform for everyone? Well, I’d say it is about time to put your money where your mouth is, and start getting serious about that commitment. It is never too late to change a public stance and get positive reactions for it. The doors aren’t closed, and I, for one, would whole-heartedly welcome that change of attitude from your end and not bitch about it when it happens. Your call!
And this is probably as positive as continued critiques are going to get.
There’s so much worth quoting from this post that I had difficulty picking the best excerpt, so I’ll add my thoughts on the other options below, in a slightly different order than they appear in the original post.
… what I see here is a repetitive pattern seen in many other projects, too. Treating accessibility as a bolt-on step at the end of any given cycle never works, will never pay off, and never lead to good inclusive results.
That statement holds true no matter how many slogans or how much positivity you pile on top of it. And I keep bringing up the positivity thing because it’s particularly galling when WordPress leadership preaches inclusion, everyone, and the like, only to have the bits that are inconvenient ignored or dismissed as mere negativity when it comes down to brass tacks.
The fact that a bunch of currently fully able-bodied people have actively decided to not be inclusive from the start means that a lot of decisions requiring a certain amount of both empathy and expertise need to be made at lower levels, and pushed into the product via grass root methods, which are often long and cumbersome and only lead to slow results. These can be very tiring.
This whole situation is crap. The fact that a bunch of us essentially have to stick around because if we don’t the accessibility won’t happen and we have to fight against the laziness of leadership, (and let me be clear here, by leadership I mean the decisionmakers, which doesn’t include most of the people working on Gutenberg, even the designers and developers who carry the title of lead), is demonstration all by itself that accessibility/inclusion isn’t a priority.
I don’t know why other accessibility advocates stick around despite this, I can only speak for myself.
I stick around although with more built-in intermittent breaks out of (1) pure stubbornness and (2) the desire to ensure that people with disabilities are just as able to have an open, independent home on the web just like everyone else and (3) the self-interest I started with.
People with disabilities shouldn’t have to be stuck with Facebook or Twitter, with all their problems, because the benevolent dictator of one of the largest free software projects makes promises, implied or otherwise, about inclusion and “everyone” which he then finds inconvenient to keep.
I once kept a job for two years after the software I needed to do that job became inaccessible because I refused to accept termination and a severence package in lieu of the accessibility issues being resolved. I used that time to hack on WordPress and learn my way around it, and I have benefited greatly from that initial learning and the assistance and friendship or even family of the WordPress community.
If I could manage to keep that job until I could leave on my terms, I will figure out how to stick with WordPress either until things get better or I leave on my terms.
I’m definitely not walking away while that piece paraphrasing my original HeroPress essay is still up on WordPress.org. I still stand by a lot of what’s there, especially the bits about the community, but if I go along to get along, or don’t speak up about this stuff when I think it’s warranted, then essentially I provide an easy way for that piece to be used as promotional material or evidence of a claim that is more like an ideal to be striven for as long as the circumstances are just right.
I don’t have any intention of serving as a token.
I realize all of the above probably sounds like I’m being an arrogant jerk, although I don’t intend arrogance at all, and I hope the people who know me and who have interacted with me also realize that.
I’m thankful for the rest of the accessibility advocates in this community especially, and the rest of the accessibility team who work so hard on a daily basis and never complain when surely they could be doing other things with their free time.
And I’m thankful to the accessibility advocates outside the WordPress community who have spoken up on these issues.
Finally, I’m thankful for Marco joining the discussion.
Yes, I’m tired. But if I can manage to keep a job for two years and leave on my own terms and only on my own terms, I can stick around and help everyone who has spoken up and sacrificed their free time win this. We’ll do it eventually.