Every day, I come across articles in my various news feeds about the latest moral or ethical outrage in tech. They’re usually different kinds of moral or ethical outrages, but I think they all stem from the same root problem: Arrogance on the part of the tech industry. I think, as a general rule, our industry tends to not think about the negative effects the things we create can have on society in general and the lives of individuals in particular. We tend to view the idea of tech taking over everything as a good thing, we assume that whatever we’re creating is part of that goodness, and when someone does bad things with it, we come back with something along the lines of “We can’t control what people do with our stuff.” We pretend that the things we create are neutral and that we as an industry are a shining city on a hill, when really neither of these beliefs are true at all and are prime examples of our telling ourselves what we want to hear and believe instead of acknowledging the realities of the situation: Technology is not neutral, we have a lot of power over society and over individuals thanks to tech being as pervasive as it is and getting more pervasive by the day, and while we can’t prevent every bad actor from using what we create, we could work a lot harder to make it more difficult to do horrible things with our creations. We’re not building neuclear bombs, after all.

If we want to become an industry the public can trust, we need to get our stuff together, and we can start with stripping away the arrogance. I’m thinking of a certain type of founder here, but really, we’re all susceptible to it. It’s really easy to convince ourselves that we’re drowning in awesome sauce, that everything we do has zero ethical problems, but that’s mostly because we generally refuse to consider ethics in tech, and so since we’re not considering it as a discipline, there must not be a problem. But ignoring a problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and the longer we continue to ignore this as an industry, the worse it’s going to get. And eventually, as people become more technologically literate, they’ll begin to look more closely at what we do outside of code as well as inside it. We cannot continue to freewheel through people’s lives, reduce them to one-dimentional users, and then walk away from the consequences that inevitably result from our actions. None of this is to say that the things we create are evil by default. I still believe that we can do a lot of good in the world. But we need to concentrate on making sure that we’re actually creating things that are beneficial, and guard against our creations being used for evil as extensively as we can. In short, we need to grow up and start demonstrating that we have the capacity to act ethically and responsibly.

I personally find introductions where I have to say nice things about myself hard to write, but another one of my 2018 goals is to do more self-promotion while not becoming annoying or conceited about it, so here’s my introduction to the rest of the participants of the January 2018 Ultimate Blog Challenge.

My story on the web begins with a course on HTML I took as part of my computer science studies back in 1998. It was my favorite part of that year’s curriculum, and I spent the rest of my school career and early work years tinkering with web technologies. I use a piece of technology called a screen reader, because I am totally blind. This meant that I needed to make sure that my web tinkerings had an accessible result, because if they didn’t, I myself would not be able to use them. So along with experimenting with things like HTML and CSS, I used tools like Bobby along with manual testing with my screen reader to make sure that I could use what I created.

In 2005, while I was trying to solve the problem of displaying the Hebrew date on my very simple blog, I ran across WordPress. Never having used free licensed open source (FLOSS) software before, I assumed that WordPress was going to cost me and that the plugin I needed was going to cost me further. This was not the case. So after work one day, I decided to go through the famous five-minute install, and I had WordPress up and running on this site, which at the time was my personal site on the web.

During the day I went to work at my job, and after work I experimented with WordPress. This included hacking themes and plugins, breaking things, and learning how to fix them.

Then, one day when I went into work, I found that the software I needed to use to do my job became completely inaccessible. This meant that I literally could not do my job. There were some attempts by our operations manager at the time to try to get the software fixed, but since the call center I worked for didn’t have control of the software, those efforts amounted to something along the lines of “we’re terribly sorry our software doesn’t work for you, and here’s this other blind guy who works for the same call center you do, and this other one who works in-house with us, and maybe you guys can come up with a work-around.” Spoiler alert: We didn’t.

When the effort to get the software I needed to use to do my job proved unsuccessful, the next option according to the call center was to terminate my employment, hand me a severence package, and send me on my way. Of course I was deeply unsatisfied with this option, because I had done nothing to warrant termination, and a severence package wasn’t going to make the fact that I was going to be out of a job any more palatable. Fortunately, I had a supervisor who was willing to go to bat for me like nobody’s business, along with a systems administrator who was willing to bend the rule about low-level employees not having anything but restricted internet access on their work stations.

So because I wouldn’t agree to the termination and severence package, and because the call center I worked for didn’t want a discrimination lawsuit on their hands, I spent my last two years at that job hacking on WordPress for eight hours a day.

In mid 2007, I accepted a tech support role with Freedom Scientific, a veteran provider of assistive technology for individuals with blindness, low-vision and learning disabilities. This was my first position involving remote work, and I continued to hack on WordPress after work while supporting users of Freedom Scientific software by day, assisting with installing their flagship product, Jaws for Windows on individual machines, as well as configuring license servers to work with various corporate and government firewalls and networks. My duties also included supporting users of notetakers such as the Braille ‘N Speak, which you can see demonstrated in the below video.

Things were going great until I received an email one Saturday morning from my manager at Freedom Scientific letting me know that my hours had been reduced to zero, and that once I sent my phone and other equipment back I would receive my last paycheck. I now had a ton of free time on my hands, and no income. I applied for Social Security Disability and waited for that to kick in, while living off the six months’ worth of pay I had saved. I also decided to go back to school to obtain various Cisco and Red Hat certifications. I thought that these would be my way back into the workforce. I was very wrong.

As I began taking courses for my certifications, I learned that the certifications themselves were completely inaccessible. This meant that I could take courses all day long, but I couldn’t pass them because the certifications were required as part of the final grade. My GPA tanked, I lost my financial aid, and everything started cascading down from there. My health took a turn for the worse and I was diagnosed with Lupus eventually, I was evicted from my apartment, and I moved to Augusta, Georgia because my friends Wil and Denise offered me a couch and a roof over my head.
I was still hacking WordPress through all of this. It was the only stable part of my life. I wanted to help make it more accessible for people with disabilities, so I googled WordPress and accessibility and stumbled on the WordPress Accessibility Team in 2012. I was elated that it existed and joined up. Shortly after that, I finally got my own place to live, and started thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life in regard to work. I thought I could build things with WordPress for a living, but wasn’t sure if anyone else was doing it. I had heard stories, but figured they were one-offs and assumed given my recent string of failures that I could never pull it off.
I had begun listening to podcasts by this point, so I started looking for WordPress-related ones. I stumbled on the Drad Cast. I was expecting it to be full of technical things, but not very entertaining. Wrong again. I loved it. It was WordPress, beer and hilarity all rolled into one. And they talked about security as well, which is another subject I’m passionate about, along with accessibility. When the Drad Cast announced that WordSesh was going to happen, I was stoked. It was twenty-four hours of WordPress crack, and it was completely online. This was good because travel was out of the question. I made sure to tune in and stayed up the entire time listening to and absorbing WordPress knowledge. I also started interacting with WordPress people on Twitter, and learned about the wider community and how awesome it was. A couple of months after that I started using Genesis, which made WordPress development quicker as far as the front end is concerned. And I was still contributing as part of WordPress Accessibility. Things had finally started to pick up.
In 2014, I filed for incorporation in Georgia, and Customer Servant Consultancy became an actual entity. It was the name I had been operating under since I started building things with WordPress for other people and I was glad to make it official. It was also around this time that I started building internal systems with WordPress to manage projects and customer relations. Since WordPress is open source, and becoming more and more accessible by the day, I was able to gain more independence because I wasn’t at the mercy of web and application developers who know nothing about accessibility. I could build it myself as long as I had the time.

Fast forward to 2018, another year full of promise and potential. The internet is ever-changing, and the WordPress community is going strong. I never expected to find my nitche through a random web search so many years ago.

Several of my goals for 2018, (goals mind you, not resolutions, simply because I don’t like all the social baggage that comes with that term and I also hate conformity), revolve around my websites. I’m working on aligning my personal and professional site (this one) with the principles of the indieweb, and part of that effort involves writing less content specifically for the various social media silos and more on my own sites, which then gets syndicated to social media silos. I thought that joining with a group of people who are similarly interested in bolstering the presence of their own blogs would be a great way to help accomplish this, as well as build some new relationships. I’ve also got a ton more writing to do for the WordPress with a Screen Reader series, and writing shorter posts each day will exercise the writing muscles I need for that series. I’m looking forward to reading what everyone else has to write, commenting on those posts, and adding my own posts to the effort.

If you want to join us, you can visit the Ultimate Blog Challenge website, and sign up for yourself. There’s also a Facebook group as well as a Twitter hashtag you can follow to read submissions from other participants. I’m looking forward both to my part in the challenge, as well as interacting with everyone else. Welcome to 2018, everyone.

OK third-party WordPress, we need to have a come to Jesus meeting about your accessibility flare. The day I hoped and prayed would never arrive, and which I feared would get here despite my wishes, is here. People and organizations who choose WordPress because of its power and flexibility, and yes, because it can often be easier and less expensive to use than creating a custom solution, are being served with demand letters regarding the accessibility of the websites they build. Websites they build with our themes and our plugins. I have two clients in my cue right now, both within a matter of days, who find themselves in this position, and they’re lawyers have already responded to the demand letters agreeing to terms. This is good for business, for obvious reasons. But it does not make me happy at all. Not one bit. The fact is, I want people to build accessible websites because it’s the right thing to do, not because they have to be sued into compliance or bullied into same. We, as software creators, have a responsibility to ensure that we don’t put them in this position, whether the plugins they use or the theme they use are premium or free. The resources are out there for you to learn how to write accessible code and how to design accessibly. Trust me, this is not some sort of “Hey your stuff sucks, hire me and I’l help you fix it” marketing campaign. I want you to fix your stuff, regardless of whether or not I get anything out of it. I want people who use WordPress to be able to rest assured that, when they build with our stuff, they are building things that are inclusive of everyone, without having to ask. I want people to be able to build accessible websites without having to hire someone who specializes in accessibility to do it for them. I do not want some momblogger to be served with a demand letter, only to find that the site they built with a $100 theme and some free plugins is now going to cost them thousands of dollars any way they cut it. The only people who really win in these senarios are the lawyers sending the demand letters. There’s consequently a backlash brewing in the legislature, which if successful, will further punish people with disabilities by restricting the already-limited solutions we have for resolving accessibility complaints. And make no mistake about this, people with disabilities are not at fault for wanting their civil rights to be upheld. Accessibility is a civil right. This talk explains.

WordPress now powers close to 30% of the web, or even if you don’t like that stat, still a sizeable portion of it. With that kind of reach comes responsibility. We can say all we want that it’s the responsibility of the people building the websites to look after accessibility. That’s fair when the only people building websites are web professionals. But web professionals are far from the only ones building websites. We, as people who build for WordPress, are not responsible for what any other platform does. But we are responsible for what we do. And we build plugins and themes like it’s going out of style, which people then download and use to build websites. We have an obligation to ensure that we don’t expose them to risks like this without their knowing it. In a lot of these cases, if some small organization or business gets a demand letter, their only recourse is to take the site down, since they could never afford to spend thousands of dollars on a custom website in the first place. That means their voice goes silent. We are in the business of democratizing publishing. That also extends to building the actual website. And the thing is, this is completely unavoidable, and by unavoidable, I don’t mean in exchange for people with disabilities putting their civil rights on the back burner. This situation should not be happening, and we, as the creators of this software, have an opportunity to help stem some of this, and a responsibility to do so. I am serious. I do not want to see another urban clinic, or another non-profit, or another momblogger, served with a demand letter and faced with a bill in the thousands of dollars for fixing it because they chose WordPress instead of a custom solution. Of course, I will fix sites, switch out plugins and themes, ETC. But this is not the way accessibility should be mainstreamed. Bringing the legislative hammer down on people with disabilities is not the answer. Waiting on the Department of Justice to get its act together and settle this is also not the answer. But third-party WordPress, this game where accessibility is a nice-to-have or an afterthought is over. With or without my help, start getting your crap together. Seriously. And yes, Envato, this especially includes you, because let me tell you what’s happening. Someone wants/needs to build a website, and so they go looking for the perfect theme. So they google, and they land on ThemeForest, and find the perfect theme with all the right features, pretty demmo, all that. They then buy it and set it up, caring nothing about proper theme architecture, bundling plugins, none of that. And then, they get served with a demand letter or lawsuit. And they don’t care how the theme was built/what makes up their website. They care that they were able to spend $50-$100 and have a presence on the web. And Envato, the majority of those sales are going to you and your authors. So I do not care if you have to make a mandatory rule stating that no theme can exist on your site without following the WordPress theme accessibility guidelines, do it. I don’t care if you then have to take those theme guidelines and apply them to the front end of the plugins your authors bundle in. Do it. Obviously this goes for the rest of you too, but Envato is huge in this. So once again, get your crap together, do your f*cking jobs, so your users don’t walk into this unaware.

The media modal has been a source of significant frustration in the past for screen reader users, unless you use a specific commercial screen reader and your version of that commercial screen reader is up-to-date. The level of frustration has been significant enough to discourage people who use screen readers to leave out media on their sites altogether and opt to use closed platforms to share their media instead.

And yet, you can’t build a modern site without some media included. Media like images can help break up walls of text, making your content easier to read. This means that the media modal is unavoidable. Thanks to incremental improvements in both the code used to build the WordPress media modal, as well as improvements in NVDA 2017.4, the frustration level has been significantly decreased, and while the experience isn’t completely frictionless, adding media to widgets, posts and pages is no longer something that’s a stretch to reach for people who use screen readers.

I decided to turn this section of the tutorial on widgets into its own separate post for easier reference, and because the general widgets tutorial is already long. This material will also come up again when we get to the sections on editing and creating posts and pages, and I’ll reproduce these steps in those sections so you don’t have to refer back to this post in order to find them. I’ll go through adding the audio widget step-by-step, from first adding the widget to selecting audio for it. Because the process is almost identical for the image, video, and gallery widgets, I’ll note the differences between these and the audio widget. With all of that said, let’s get started.

The Audio Widget

From your widgets screen, with accessibility mode activated, navigate to the heading labeled “Audio”. Press the up-arrow key once until you encounter a link labeled “Add audio,” and then press enter on that. On the next screen, navigate to the heading labeled “Widget Audio,” or press your screen reader’s shortcut key for navigating to an edit field specifically, or a form control in general, to navigate to the “title” field for this widget. Using the shortcut key to navigate to an edit field specifically will be quicker, because if you navigate to form controls in general, you’ll have to move past the “expand/collapse menu”, “help”, and “screen options” buttons.

Once you’ve navigated to the “title” field, enter a title. If you decide that you don’t want a title for this instance of the audio widget, leave it blank. If you decide to leave the title blank, your audio widget will not have any heading associated with it. This can impair your site’s useability for some users, so if your audio widget contains a piece of content you’d rather your users not skip, consider giving it an enticing title that will grab attention and interest your users in exploring your audio content.

Directly below the “title” field, you’ll find a message that says “No audio selected”. This message will disappear once you’ve selected an audio file for the widget. Beneath the message, you’ll find a button labeled “Add Audio.” Press enter on this, and the fun begins.

Once you press enter on the “Add Audio” button, focus moves to the media modal. This modal appears at the bottom of the document object model, which means it appears after the “Thank you for creating with WordPress” message. Once you’ve navigated into the modal, the first thing you’ll find is the “Close media pannel” button. If you press enter on this, the media modal closes, and focus moves back to the “Add Audio” button. Press the “Add Audio” button again to re-open the modal if you’ve accidentally closed it.

Directly below the “Close media pannel” button, you’ll find two links:

• “Add audio”, which is selected by default, and
• “Insert from URL”, which you can select by pressing enter if you don’t want to or can’t host the media yourself, and you want to insert it into the widget from another source.

Next, you’ll find a heading at level one with the text” “Add audio”. This text will change to “Insert from URL” if that option is selected. Directly beneath the level-one heading, you’ll find two links:

• Upload files, and
• Media library, which is selected by default.

Below these two links, you’ll find a combo box that allows you to filter media by the date it was uploaded to your media library, and the default value is “All dates”. Below the date combo box, you’ll find a search form you can use to search for media. If you leave the search field blank, you’ll see a list of all audio you’ve uploaded to your site, shown according to filename. Each filename is a checkbox. Once you check the filename you want to insert, you’ll be dropped into browse/forms mode, and your screen reader will announce the URL of the file you’re inserting. The field you’re being dropped into is the search field. If you press tab, you’ll be able to navigate through the list of all the audio you’ve uploaded, and you’ll hear a message letting you know which filename you’ve selected, and that you can deselect it. Pressing tab again, you’ll hear “filename checkbox checked deselect button”, where “filename” is the name of the file.

We interrupt this important program to bring you a message of gladness and sincere thanks.

Wait, did you say we can select previously uploaded media?

Yes. You read that correctly. If you’ve already uploaded any kind of media to your WordPress installation, you can now select media you’ve already uploaded to be inserted into your widget, instead of having to re-upload the media again if you want to use it, and you can check and uncheck boxes without being in browse mode. For a while, you could only do this if you were using Jaws for Windows. If you were a VoiceOver or NVDA user, or you used another screen reader altogether, you had to switch to using Jaws for Windows in order to work with the media modal. Switching back and forth between screen readers is nothing new. People who use screen readers do this all the time. Switching back and forth while you’re in the middle of a task like adding content to your website is particularly frustrating though, and for some of us is a major interruption. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m extremely happy about the fact that this is no longer necessary when I’m adding media in WordPress. Happy as in jumping up and down like a kid at Christmas. The media modal has been a huge bugbear for the WordPress Accessibility Team, so much so that several of us have given up on it and have been just hoping that it would be completely eliminated. For me personally, this part of editing and creating WordPress sites is the only part I’ve hated. Now that I can do something as simple as check boxes to select already-uploaded media while using my favorite screen reader, I hate this process a lot less.

OK, we now return you to your regularly-scheduled program.

Once you’ve selected the file you want to insert, press your screen reader’s shortcut key to navigate to the next edit field. The first one you’ll find in this group is a read-only field listing the URL of the file. Next, you’ll find a field where you can change the title of the file. This doesn’t change the filename on the server, but it does change the title the media is stored with in your database. Once you’re done with the title, you can press tab and fill in the artist, album, caption, and description. All of this information is optional, and you can choose to do nothing with these fields. Beneath the “Description” field, you’ll find a button labeled “Add to widget”. Pressing this will add the audio you’ve selected to your widget. You can also upload new audio directly from this screen, and follow the same insertion proceedure. Once this is done, you’ll select a sidebar for the widget as well as its position, as with any other widget. The media modal will close once you’ve made your selection and inserted your media, and you’ll be back where you started. However, the button labelled “Add Audio” now has a label of “Edit Audio”, and the “No audio selected” message is replaced by a player you can use to preview your audio selection.

To remove the audio you’ve chosen, press enter on the “Edit audio” button. The media modal will re-open, and your focus will move to the “Close media pannel” button. Below this is a link labelled “Cancel edit.” This is followed by a link labelled “Audio details,” and this is selected by default. So the heading at level one on this page contains the text: “Audio details.” Directly below the “Audio details” heading is another player you can use to preview your audio, followed by an edit field containing the audio file’s URL which you can edit, and a button labelled “Remove audio source.” Pressing this button will remove your audio from the widget and return you to the “Add audio” button, with the message “No audio selected” above it.

Below the “Remove audio source” button, you’ll find a prompt advising you to add alternative sources for maximum HTML 5 playback. This is because not all browsers support every file format, and so for the most coverage, you either need to use a file format they all support, (like Mp3), or if you choose to use a file format only supported by some browsers, you can add alternate formats for the rest. To add an alternative format, press enter on the button below the alternative format prompt. This button is labeled “Ogg”, but once you’ve pressed enter on this and moved to the next screen, you can choose any format WordPress supports. If WordPress doesn’t support a particular format, you won’t see files with that extension when you’re either browsing through your media library or uploading a file.

When “Insert from URL” is selected, the “Add media” pannel becomes much simpler, at least for audio. You’re given a field to input a URL to an audio file, and an “Add to widget” button. You’ll still need to make sure you link to a file format supported by WordPress, and to keep things simple, I’ll suggest again that you stick to mp3, since everyone supports it. You do not have the opportunity to add any meta data to your audio if you insert from URL.

The Image and Video Widgets

To add an image or video widget in WordPress, you’ll follow the same process as you followed to add the audio widget. The differences will be the file format you can choose from, which will differ for both image and video, and the types of meta data you’ll enter for the image or video will be different: Alternative text for example instead of artist. With the image widget, you also have the ability to link the image to nothing, directly to the media file, to the image’s attachment page so people can view all the details of the image, or to a custom URL. These options are contained in a combo box. You’ll also be able to choose an image size: Small, medium, medium-large, and large. The specifics of each size are dictated by your theme, and when you upload images to your media library, WordPress generates all necessary sizes so that different sizes can be served to different browsers depending on screen size. Mobile devices get a smaller image size, for example. When inserting an image from a URL, you have the option to link to the image itself, a custom URL, or no URL at all. On this screen, these options are buttons and not a combo box. When inserting video from a URL, you can insert from any of the providers WordPress supports, including Youtube. This means that you can host your videos on Youtube, (as long as you follow their content guidelines), and have the player show up on your site, without having to work directly with embed code.

Once you’re done editing your image or video details, press enter on the “Add to widget” button, and the media modal will close. You can then choose the sidebar for the widget and save it.

The Gallery Widget

With WordPress’s gallery widget, you’ll add images just as you would for the single image widget, and you’ll edit each image’s details before you insert it into the gallery. As you’re adding images and editing details, WordPress will let you know how many images you’ve selected with a prompt that appears just below the “description” field for the image you’re editing. Directly below this prompt, you’l find a button labeled “Edit selection”, which you can use to remove images you’ve already selected. To clear the entire selection, press enter on the button labeled “Clear” just beneath the button labeled “Edit selection”. Once you’re done adding all your images, you’ll insert the whole gallery into the widget, and then choose its sidebar as usual.

I have no idea who exactly is responsible for the fixes to NVDA and WordPress that produced the alignment of stars which allows people who use screen readers to use already-uploaded media when adding widgets or content within posts. Maybe these changes are tiny in the grand scheme of both projects, and whoever made them is thinking they’re not very impactful. Spoiler alert: They’re huge. I have a feeling I know who made the changes in WordPress. If I’m wrong, please feel free to correct me. But if it’s who I think it is, Andria, I owe you at least one drink if we ever meet in person. On the NVDA side, I’ve searched the 2017.4 issues, and I’m not coming up with anything. All I know is this wasn’t possible with 2017.3 when I was writing the original widgets tutorial. That’s part of the reason why this content isn’t part of that. I sent a direct message to one NVDA regular contributor asking about this, and I haven’t heard back. So whoever you are on the NVDA side, thank you for whatever you did. You’ve helped make my life a whole lot easier, and, (along with those who work on making WordPress more accessible), opened up the possibility for me to do at least two things. First, I can haz photoblog now yay. Second, when I’m building sites for clients, I now have a choice to decide whether or not to hire someone else to handle the media portion. So, whoever you are, a thousand thanks, and if we ever happen to meet in person, I also owe you at least one drink.

Everyone else, you can now start adding media to your sites now without a ton of frustration and anger. Go forth and make your sites rich and pretty.

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.