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.
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.
http://wptavern.com/wordpress-theme-review-team-votes-on-new-guidelines-to-ban-obtrusive-upselling
This is a move I’m glad to see, and, I’m also glad the plugins team is considering similar guidelines for the plugin directory.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against upselling. I use the Genesis framework, after all, and I use a lot of premium plugins in my work. These guidelines aren’t addressing upselling in general so much as “in your face” upselling within the WordPress.org directories, along with crippleware. Both crippleware on .org and obtrusive upselling are bad for the community, in my opinion. I’m of course not saying that everything should be no charge, all the time. But WordPress.org is where new users get their start with WordPress, and if we nickel and dime them to death, we’re leaving a bad taste in their mouths.
As someone who builds websites, works on themes and builds custom plugins for a living, I’ll be the first one to tell you that a good website is an investment. But I also remember what it was like to come across WordPress for the first time, and at that time, I wasn’t looking for something to invest in. I was looking for something that would solve a very specific problem, and I had no idea where things would go from there. I think that’s where all new users of WordPress.org are, and for a lot of the users who continue there, building a top-notch website isn’t what they’re looking for. They’re looking for something to play with, something to help with a hobby, or something to put up a quick and dirty website that doesn’t look like it escaped from the 90’s and that they can add features to through plugins. Eventually, if they decide to become full or part time developers, they’ll switch to paid plugins and themes for a lot of their clients, depending on budget. But I think we as a community need to work hard to make sure that WordPress.org doesn’t become a vehicle for turning people away from WordPress the project and WordPress the community. These steps by the theme and plugin teams are definitely in the right direction.
Update:
This article was originally posted at A List Apart, and generated a lot of very thoughtful and insightful comments. It has since been taken down, and re-posted at Heather Burns’ site. It’s always a sad thing when big-name web publications sensor in order to avoid or deflect controversy.
Digital legislation is confusing and outdated—Heather Burns shows how professionalizing the web industry can help.
Source: The Perfect Storm in Digital Law
This entire article is worth a thoughtful read, and I think it has implications for not only those of us who work as web professionals generally, but accessibility professionals in particular as well.
Specifically, the accessibility profession is going to have to join the greater web profession in working towards a solution to the problems outlined here, and in order to do that, it’s going to have to become a lot less insular. It’s going to have to learn to play well with the greater web community, regardless of whether or not that community as a whole has signed onto accessibility as a right and obligation.
In other words, every one of us is going to have to shelve our pride in whatever we work on and learn to play ball professionally witheach other and other communities who are going to have to come under our umbrella, because we’re up the creek if we don’t get it together.
Dries Buytaert asks “Can we save the open web?” and makes an amazing case for why we should. I agree with and endorse basically everything in that post.
Source: Saving the Open Web | Matt Mullenweg
The post Matt links to is an excellent one, and the only thing I would add to it is that saving the open web is everybody’s responsibility. Over the last couple of decades, we’ve allowed the web to become broken in various ways, and we all have a share in its brokenness. Saving the web, making it open again, and fixing the brokenness are all interrelated in my opinion, and I think we need to take some time, slow down a bit, and start fixing this. This will include very sexy things, (like emerging technologies), and very unsexy things, (like web developers learning to HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript properly). All four of those technologies are very important, and, if handled and interacted with properly, can do some amazing things. But all of us need to crawl on the floor with all of these before we can run with them, and that includes crawling on the floor with HTML before we get to play with the cool things like JavaScript. Do HTML badly and your PHP and especially JS will also be done badly.