Amanda Rush

MM: but a key thing we have to fix is the team working in a less adversarial way with all the other contributors to WordPress — for example collaborating on posts like this, not tossing them over the transom.

AR: I can’t speak for the rest of the accessibility team, but I should not have to politely ask you not to violate my civil and human rights as a person with a disability yet again, and I should not have to ask you not to turn the Four Freedoms into the Three Obligations plus I left you a freedom as a consolation prize why aren’t you thanking me? I don’t think the rest of the team has been adversarial at all and I’ve attended quite a few of the meetings and bug scrubs over the last year and a half. I will freely admit to being adversarial myself, and will continue to do so without apology until your words and your actions match. Saying you want publishing online to be accessible to as many people as possible and doing it are two very different things. You can’t claim that galleries, embeds, color picking, adjusting fonts (or design elements are improvements when a specific subset of your user base cannot use them until you get around to solving a problem you created by not designing with accessibility in mind from the word go. You can’t claim keyboard shortcuts as an improvement when they are designed without taking into account how people who use a keyboard to do everything on a daily basis actually use that keyboard. You create your own keyboard shortcuts when you need to do so because for some reason or other you cannot use a native element and you cannot replace the missing semantics for your custom element. This is also fundamental to accessibility. So I’d say that statement that you lack fundamental understanding of accessibility is dead accurate, however impolite or uncivil it is. I will wait to see if you answer Brian’s questions below concretely. I would also like to add a few questions of my own: What are you going to do to ensure that this doesn’t happen again? Are you, for example, going to begin to advocate for accessibility in the same way you’ve advocated for translation and internationalization? Are you going to ensure that the developers and designers under your aegis are provided the resources to make sure they are able to design and develop with accessibility in mind from the start? Are you going to ensure that there are policies in place with regard to accessibility that cannot be pushed aside for the sake of expediency? If you answer both my and Brian’s questions in the affirmative and without meaningless plattitudes and you follow through with matching actions then I will be the first person to go to bat for you and shout from the rooftops about the improvements being made because believe me I’d rather not be adversarial. It’s exhausting. But accessibility is far too important to be swept under the rug or shrugged off when it’s lacking for the sake of maintaining business as usual or not bruising egoes.

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