Category: Learning From The Community

There are 56 posts filed in Learning From The Community (this is page 5 of 10).

https://wordpress.tv/2017/12/10/morten-rand-hendriksen-gutenberg-and-the-wordpress-of-tomorrow/

I’ve been waiting for this talk to go up on WordPress TV because I missed it when Morten first delivered it at WordCamp US. It’s no secret that I have a hate-hate relationship with WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get” editors for the web. Part of that is because I think if people are going to build websites, then they should learn foundational web technologies deeply. Part of that is also because literally every single one of these editors, when placed in a web context, has been completely inaccessible. I’m including page builders in this, because the problem they’re trying to solve is the “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get” thing, but for people who aren’t developers. I started working with things on the web back in 1998. That’s a long time ago. Every single WYSIWYG editor and page builder I’ve encountered from that day to this has proven me right. Geocities page builder. Yahoo page builder. The website wizard that ships with Cpanel. Squarespace. Strikingly. Medium. Beaver Builder. Visual Composer. Wix, (except for that one time they borrowed code from the WordPress.com app). Every single one of these, along with every other similar thing I haven’t named, has been or is unuseable if you use assistive technology, or even just don’t use a mouse. When Gutenberg first came on the scene as a plugin in beta, I tested it twice, and was absolutely certain that it would be just like all the others. I kept hearing, “We’re going to make it accessible,” to which my response, (at least internally), was “Sure you are. Just like all the others who talked about how important accessibility is, only to leave it out when it came to the editor/page builder.” My initial tests cemented that response. I wasn’t alone when it came to being highly skeptical of Gutenberg and accessibility.

And then, things started changing. The Gutenberg developers were serious about making sure Gutenberg is accessible to everyone, with the best example so far being the demmo at this year’s State of the Word highlighting what I’ll refer to as color contrast guardrails. That’s not cosmetic accessibility. It’s not something like “we added some read-aloud kind of feature and a font resizer and: Magic! We haz accessibility now!” The Gutenberg experience still isn’t great when it comes to accessibility. There’s still a lot of work to be done. But Gutenberg is proving me wrong with regard to WYSIWYG editors, and I’ve never been more happy or more proud to be wrong in my life. This is actually happening. There’s actually going to be an accessible visual editor. People with disabilities are going to get to play on the same playground as everyone else is for once. We finally get to play in a world that everyone else has played in for the last twenty years, and this makes Gutenberg genuinely exciting. It’s vital though that Gutenberg is properly documented for screen reader users. First, WordPress has to establish trust with a group of people who have years or even decades of experience of being burned by these kinds of editors. That may not be fair to WordPress, but if WordPress is entering this space, it’s now in the position of having to clear away the baggage left behind by everyone else, and people who use screen readers have very long memmories when it comes to these sorts of things. Merely saying “Our thing is accessible” is not enough. I didn’t believe accessibility was going to be taken seriously, and that’s despite being a member of the WordPress Accessibility Team and having a bias in favor of WordPress for which I’m famous. Convincing anyone else that we mean it when we say this is useable by everyone regardless of whether or not assistive technology is involved is going to take work, and part of that work is going to be convincing people with disabilities to make that leap while trusting that what’s on the other side isn’t going to be the same old song and dance that’s gone on for the last twenty years. Second, the steps that everyone else has been gradually making over the last twenty years with regard to WYSIWYG editors and page builders are all going to be combined into one giant leap for people who use screen readers, because the workaround when you can’t use a visual editor is to rely on a text-based one, whether that’s copying and pasting from a text file or switching the TinyMCE editor to text mode in WordPress. People who use screen readers are now going to have to integrate all the visual concepts, along with the technical aspect of controlling them. We’ve been able to avoid doing that, unless we’re web developers, at which point we then start wrestling with CSS. But if you’re not a web developer and you’re focusing on using software like this, until Gutenberg, you’ve been able to almost completely avoid dealing with visuals, unless you’re doing something like choosing a theme or adding images to a post or page. Otherwise, it’s text whenever possible. Changing the status quo this much, without documentation to aid the transition for people who use screen readers, ensures that as a user group, we are not likely to make the leap, unless we have a pressing need to do so. As a whole, we’ll just switch to a different platform with less advanced editing, or, if we don’t already have websites, just not have a website at all and use Twitter or Facebook to create content on the web. Personally, I’m willing to make the leap, and help others do the same. I want everyone to participate in the WordPress of tomorrow, to continue to have the ability to choose whether or not to own their own data, ETC. But I have a vested interest in WordPress. I want everyone who wants to use WordPress to be able to keep up with the changes that are coming without having to make a choice to add content to their websites that’s based on “How much mental and emotional energy am I going to have to put into this?” That’s not going to be possible unless there is proper documentation to go along with the software.

Jeremy Felt gave the below talk at this year’s WordCamp US, in which he details how just over a year ago, Washington State University received a complaint through the Office of Civil Rights that some of their web pages were not accessible, and what they’re doing to resolve the complaint. I have some thoughts that I’ll share after the video.

Download “Managing accessible content on thousands of sites” directly.
There are a few things that stood out for me in this talk. First, the transparency. I’m glad to see some universities detailing how they’re resolving OCR complaints, because it shows universities who are in the process of figuring out how to resolve complaints a path forward. The talk also demonstrates that, if a university with five million URLs to handle can get the process going, so can universities with smaller web footprints, and even K-12 schools with tiny budgets. Washington State has even made their tools and related documentation freely available. Free as in other universities can download them and use them without spending budget. I’m sure other universities have also made tools available, but this is a pretty extensive collection, and they’re not even all WordPress. So if a school isn’t using WordPress, there’s still something here they can use. Not that schools had any excuse before now to use to suport waiting to make their websites accessible, because the laws governing website accessibility for schools are not new, and there have been a metric ton of OCR complaints already. Now, not only do schools have no excuses, they even have free resources they can deploy so they don’t have to create them on their own. I’m going to be spreading this talk and the linked resources as far and wide as possible.

Conferences with social media hashtags are great, because those hashtags mean that you can still glean from them even if you can’t attend. It can also be overwhelming when there’s so much goodness happening on a conference hashtag that you want to share everything you find. There’s also the problem of all the great content being generated on one social network essentially being locked into that network as long as we’re only sharing it on that network. So I’ve decided to start sharing the cool stuff I find from various conferences as blog posts. That way everyone can take advantage of it whether they’re on a particular social network or not, and I can avoid filling up people’s timelines with reposts. I can also take the liberty of providing screenshotted text in text form so that everyone can read it.

Here are my gleanings from MozFest. MozFest was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 2010. Originally named “Drumbeat,” the festival convened a community of people dedicated to learning, freedom and the open Web. Each year MozFest centers around a particular theme, and this year’s is the health of the web as a whole, (spoiler alert: It’s not good), and how we as contributors to the web can improve it. Everyone is a contributor to the health of the web, not just the people who make the software that powers it or allows people to access it or allows people to easily create content for it. This year, MozFest consisted of nine floors of talks, workshops and exhibits. Once the speaker talks are available somewhere other than Facebook Live, I’ll share some of those as well, in separate posts.

All of the content I’m sharing is publicly available within the constraints of Twitter or Facebook. I’m sharing it in the order I read it. I’ve also transcribed any screenshots I’ve shared. I’ve shared directly from the social networks, so you have the opportunity to share on your own timelines if you want, without copying and pasting. Enjoy.

Meet this year’s Mozilla Festival speakers.

Only 20% of the world, primarily white folks, are
editing 80% of Wikipedia’s content—that’s kind of
telling. Together, we realised that most of our
collective understanding of the world is still being
written by a minority.

–SIHO BOUTERSE

What we need are companies that are
not advertising platforms, to make
browsers — the basic tech of the net.

Mishi Choudhary

Have a security policy. You can think of it like the
things you are already doing to be digitally safe.
Maybe this is where it all begins.

Matt Mitchell

Digital inequality is just as bad
as any inequality.

–Alan Knott-Craig

To be digitally safe as an organisation, you need
to think of a checklist. It is a matter of time until
something happens… This checklist saves
people. If anything happens, you know what to
do.

–Matt Mitchell

Making a healthy
Internet is not a spectator
sport

–Mark Surman

More products include software inside them to be
updated over time, but practically the support to these
products ends a lot sooner than the companies are
willing to provide a warranty for the product—which is
probably insane.

–Ugo Vallauri

“I think all of us are feeling [an] urgency….You have
instability—I have been thinking about the need for
knowledge, the need for inclusion, the need for the
power and potential of the movement.

–Ryan Merkley

The Trump Administration thinks that letting some
telecom companies treating some content more
favourably than others is a good thing. Think about
how these companies treat it already. It could not be
any worse

–Ashley Black

You’ll now detox one of the browsers you use on your computer (you’ll clean up your mobile browsers
later, on Day 5). By the end of todays detox, you should be blocking a lot more information from trackers, and this in turn should make your browser less unique – since there’s less information to form a
“fingerprint”,
The devil’s in the default “Privacy Settings”
No browser’s default privacy settings are actually private by default: most store cookies, as well as
your browsing history, webform entries and other information-which can then get shared.
But Chrome, Firefox and Safari all offer a special “Private” or “Incognito” browsing mode, set to
automatically delete your browsing history, cookies, temporary files and webform entries every
time you close the browser. Note: your bookmarks and downloads are not deleted.
Try it out:
1. Open your browser (Firefox, Chrome or Safari) and go to File -• New Private/incognito Window
(depending on the browser).
2. To set Private Browsing permanently in Firefox or Safari, go to:
Firefox: menu>Preferences>Privacy>settings for history

Note on this transcribed screenshot: The last bit of text at the end is too garbled for me to make out and correct, but the steps listed above are still useful. There will be an online version of the data detox kit coming soon, and as soon as that’s available I’ll link to that instead.
https://twitter.com/hennazb/status/924229826617147392


https://twitter.com/Audesome/status/924265970516090885

Inclusive Design 24 (ID24) is happening again on November 16, and I can hardly wait. If you’re not aware of what ID24 is, it’s twenty-four hours of free talks on accessibility and inclusive design. Each talk runs for about an hour, and the entire event lasts for twenty-four hours straight. I told myself I wasn’t going to stay up for twenty-four hours again at the end of the last event, but now that it’s happening again I’m seriously reconsidering that, because it’s so much fun and there’s so much stuff to learn and cool people to engage with using the hashtag on Twitter.

In anticipation of ID24 happening again, I thought I’d share my favorite web-related talks from past events. The one I’m sharing today is “Designing for Inclusion with Media Queries,” and it was given by Eric Bailey. Eric is a Boston-based user experience designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs using accessible, performant, device-agnostic technology. You can find him on Twitter as @ericwbailey and you can read more about his work at ericwbailey.design.


In an effort to ensure I can find things later, I’ve decided to begin compiling a weekly roundup of WordPress, web accessibility and web development posts. So, welcome to the first edition. For now these are in no particular order.

Tony Gines on designing user interfaces for my mother.

As designers and developers, it’s our responsibility to make our websites not only useable, but enjoyable enough to come back to again and again.

Patrick Roland on how to be a better human, as a wrap-up of this year’s WordCamp U.S.

Karl Groves on chasing the accessibility business case, which is the conclusion of a series of posts on the topic which is worth the read and is something I always come back to for review. The main takeaway from the post is that the best argument in favor of accessibility that any business can use comes down to one word: quality.

Yoav Weiss on contributing to Chromium and the web platform itself.

Firebug is going away.

Sixty Minutes takes some of the worst examples of disability rights lawyers and sets them up as the only examples, shutting down any meaningful meaningful community-specific discussion about what is and what is not ADA trolling in the process.

Adrian Roselli on how we reward the wrong things when judging the quality of websites

Faith Macanas provides some greate starting advice for WordPress site owners by laying out some questions you should ask before adding an eCommerce plugin to your site.

Nick Hams on the true cost of bargain basement WordPress themes. I couldn’t agree more.

There’s a lot to read for this edition, so I’ll end it here for now. Enjoy, happy reading, and come back next week for the best finds from the WordPress, web accessibility and web development worlds.