#188 – Bud Kraus on Teaching and Using WordPress With Low Vision

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case teaching and using WordPress with low vision.

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So on the podcast today we have Bud Kraus. Bud was diagnosed with mascular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read.

Despite these challenges, Bud’s peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.

Bud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud? podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.

Bud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard to navigate interfaces, to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.

Bud’s story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility, not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It’s full of real world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Bud Kraus.

I am joined on the podcast by Bud Kraus. Hello, Bud.

[00:03:35] Bud Kraus: Hello, Nathan. Thanks for having me.

[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re very welcome. This is not the first time we’ve spoken, but it is the first time we’ve spoken at an event because we’re both at WordCamp US in Portland, it’s 2025. We’re in a corridor, so I’ve got to say at the very outset, if it ends up being quite noisy, there’s not a lot we can do about that. But we’ve done our best. We’ve found a nice quiet little alcove, and we’re going to be chatting today to Bud about his experience online. Before we do that, Bud, do you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself? Give us your potted bio, if you like.

[00:04:01] Bud Kraus: Yeah, sure. So I create WordPress content for WordPress businesses, articles, blog posts, tutorials, videos, and I am the host of the podcast called Seriously, Bud?

[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: And the talk that you’re doing at WordCamp US, which I guess you haven’t yet done, because we’re on the first day of presentations and it’s fairly early on. You haven’t done it, right?

[00:04:23] Bud Kraus: No, I actually, no, I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve done this a couple times, so this is not my first time doing this talk.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: So you know how it’s going to go. It’s called using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. Now, that kind of leads us into the subject at hand really. We’re going to be talking about how it is that your experience of the web may differ from other people.

Are you willing to just tell us a little bit about your experience in the offline world as well as the online world? What is it that you are dealing with on a day-to-day basis?

[00:04:50] Bud Kraus: Sure. So I have macular degeneration, which is a condition of old age, which I got when I was 37. And it’s the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. It’s a destruction of your central vision.

I have the condition in both eyes, which means I really have it. And it makes it very hard for me to see straight ahead, recognise faces, reading. I can’t drive a car, which is okay. So anything that’s straight ahead.

Now, my peripheral vision’s perfectly intact, so that means I don’t need to have a seeing eye dog or a cane, or I don’t bump into things because the peripheral vision’s fine. But the very fine vision that we all use to see straight ahead, like to thread a needle, that’s what I’m missing.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: So are you able to describe what you are seeing in that area. And is it like the central portion of your site?

[00:05:38] Bud Kraus: It is the exact central portion of my sight. So I tend to see elliptically, which means I move my eyes around to get a better picture. Like, when I’m looking at you right now, I’m moving my eyes around so I can see better because of the destruction of the centre part of my vision.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And does that rule out certain tasks? So for example, you mentioned reading there. Obviously I do not have what you have, and so it’s a given to me that when I’m staring as I am doing at the moment at my laptop, my eyes, the bullseye, if you like, of my eyes go straight to the letter looking at. And for me, it’s hard to imagine deploying my peripheral vision to do that, but can you, for example, do things like reading or is that out of the?

[00:06:16] Bud Kraus: You can’t, peripheral vision is not a, it’s not even close to being a perfect substitute for central vision. So the answer is no. You cannot read with peripheral vision. You cannot understand. You can see, but you can’t understand. And it just makes things difficult.

[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So how does that affect your real life? So obviously you mentioned things like being unable to drive a car or things like that. Is there anything else that might give us a frame of reference for just how profound it is?

[00:06:44] Bud Kraus: Well, I like to look at it differently. So I have a different approach to this. So when I first was diagnosed with this when I was 37, I thought, oh, this is the worst thing that could ever happen. And that makes sense, but it is not the worst thing that could ever happen.

And having lived with this for quite a long time now, I look at this not as a curse, but as a blessing. Because what it’s done is allow me to have so many different opportunities, experiences, ideas, thoughts, whatever that I would’ve not otherwise had.

So that process of going, it’s the grief process when you start from, you know, this is the most horrible thing in the world, to acceptance. I’m actually beyond acceptance. It’s like, I like this. This is okay with me. And do I wish it on other people? No, I don’t. But like I said, it’s not the end of the world. There are conditions and diseases that are far worse than this.

So I do think of, and in fact in my talk that I’m giving, at the end I talk about why this is a blessing and not a curse. I mean, like for example, you can get as inebriated as you want at parties because you’re not going to be driving the car home. So there’s lots of that, okay. Or you don’t see your friends get older because you can’t see the detail on their face. When I go in a grocery store, I don’t see all the junk food, so that’s good. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Do I have a hard time finding people at a large event like this? Yes. But I manage.

[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: So in the wider world, you can obviously deploy your peripheral vision. So we’re sitting in a, I don’t know, it’s maybe this room’s about 10 meters by 10 meters. There’s a lot of space. Whereas the thing that we’re talking about, WordPress, building websites and so on, it’s usually this constrained little, well, let’s say rectangle. It could be something that we’re holding our hands, a mobile phone or a computer, laptop, something like that. How does your situation, how does it get impacted by this then? Are you doing this peripheral vision, glancing left and right and trying to figure out what’s going on? Or do you have other tools, mechanisms, things that you deploy?

[00:08:39] Bud Kraus: I do, and that’s what my talk is about. So, for example, I’ve taught WordPress and I taught coding for a long time. And people say, well, how do you do that if you can’t see?

Well, one thing is I’m always very prepared. So when I go into a class, I can’t wing it. I just have to know exactly what I’m going to be doing. And in code there’s a lot of patterns and I recognise patterns.

And, yes, I do use Zoom. I use audio. I use touch. Now, touch is not really relevant here, but I’m able to, with the technology as good as it has become for me, I’m able to Zoom in and out of the screen and I’m able to read things out loud. And then I have to do a fair amount of memory. But that’s okay.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: So do you have adaptations that you make, let’s say for example, you go out today and you purchase a new computer, do you have adaptations that you make on an operating system level?

[00:09:30] Bud Kraus: Yeah, I do.

[00:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I’m curious to hear about these because I make no modifications when I purchase, so tell me more.

[00:09:35] Bud Kraus: Yeah, good question. So one of the things I do, and I’ll be demonstrating, is my resolution is a low resolution, meaning 1024 by 768 would be low today. In the olden days, that would be high. But it makes the screen, it makes it easier for me to see the screen. And then I make all kinds of adjustments to make icons bigger, letters bigger, so that it’s just works for me. And yeah, I don’t have a problem with it.

Now, it does cause me to do things maybe a little slower because it’s just harder for me to maybe find something. But I think I mentioned that patterns is a very important thing to me. So if I’m going to a website and they change the UI totally around, that’s going to be a pain in the neck for me, because then I have to relearn where everything is.

It’s sort of like changing the furniture if you were blind, I mean, really blind, which most people aren’t. So I’m legally blind but, you know, I’m not like lights out blind. If you change where things are, then it’s going to make things very difficult for me, whether it’s in the real world or in the virtual world. I have to relearn everything.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: A sort of curious question that’s just occurred to me. When you buy a new computer, is there a process whereby you have to combat the regular default icon size and default tech size, just for a moment in order to wrangle it into the version of the OS that you need?

[00:10:50] Bud Kraus: You’re absolutely right. So if you’re booting up for the first time, it’s a hole in the whole process, which is at least the last time I did, which is there’s no audio, there’s no nothing, and you’re seeing like little tiny print to, you know, configure the language and the location and the time and all that stuff that you do when you work with a computer for the first time. That is a real problem, yeah.

[00:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: You would imagine that there’d be some mechanism to invoke that as the first thing that happens?

[00:11:17] Bud Kraus: I think so.

[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Okay, so we’ve talked about the wider world. We’ve talked about a computer that you may modify. Let’s get onto the bit which we are all here for, which is WordPress. Are there any adjustments or tools, or this could extend to the browser, so it may be browser tools, what have you, but for the internet, let’s say, what are the modifications that you are making to make your life possible there?

[00:11:37] Bud Kraus: You know, I don’t think there’s anything really any different than anybody else makes. I mean, the biggest thing is I will either zoom in or out of a webpage. And it’s really funny because, if you’re using a certain screen size with a certain resolution, things can get very hard to work with. I don’t think enough companies, like I’m thinking of even LinkedIn, for example, that I was using today. Sorry to call them out, but it’s just like their chat areas were just really, I just had to do all kinds of crazy things to actually see the text. And then the text was really small.

I think because I’m a stress case, that they don’t always test down to my level. And I think it’s, I just accept it. But that’s the way it is, I guess. But I think that you don’t want to exclude people from anything really, because they may be your customer. And if I can’t buy something because it’s really hard to do, and that is something, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to you about it, but other people, that if I am discouraged from buying something because it’s just, the UI is just too hard to work with, I’ll just find an alternative. I will. Or I’ll ask my wife.

[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess you’re in a curious space as well in that we hear a lot in the accessibility space about things like screen readers and those kind of assistive technologies. I guess you are not deploying those because you have enough sight to not have that as a, something to lean upon.

[00:12:54] Bud Kraus: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I have not, and don’t use JAWS or any of those big fancy screen reader technologies. I just use what’s built into the macOS and I just highlight the text and I press a button and it reads. I think it’s called voiceover, or it’s text to speech, or whatever it is. And it’s in the accessibility part of the settings.

I don’t use technology beyond what I need it for. It’s just overkill. What do I, those are complicated systems to master, so I stay away from that because they don’t need it.

[00:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: So when you are building websites, is there anything unique about the way that you do that? Is there any sort of, again, a tool that you deploy? Or maybe you are relying on other human beings to sort of cast their eye over it a second time after you’ve done the work. I don’t know, just talk us through that whole thing.

[00:13:37] Bud Kraus: Well, I don’t make websites. No, I have, okay. I’ve done everything, but I don’t make websites because I don’t like to make websites. It’s not because of my vision. But yes, if I am working, in the past like I have, I would ask people to help me with, particularly with colour because I have a very, I think I have a poor colour palette. And I think that’s either, it’s because of me. So I have to ask, does this go good with this?

It’s just something that I, either I’m not good at, or I’m not interested, or my vision, or whatever it is. So I do have a problem with colour in that regard. But because of the technology and the tools that are built in, it’s not as difficult as one might think.

[00:14:15] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah, okay. We’ll get into that. But you do make a podcast, and there’s lots and lots of different spinning wheels that have to done there. You know, you’ve got to book people onto the show, you’ve got to have calendars, you’ve got to have posts and pages and things like that on the website. Is there anything uniquely interesting about, I understand the process of making a website from my perspective, there anything that would be different to my process than would be for yours?

[00:14:36] Bud Kraus: Yes, I think one thing I could think of is like a lot of times I won’t, let’s say in WordPress, you can write into the editor, you could write a page or a post right into the Gutenberg, the block editor. I choose not to do that. What I do is use a notepad, or not notepad, what is it for a Mac? I forgot.

[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: TextEdit.

[00:14:54] Bud Kraus: Yes, TextEdit. Thanks. I’ll use that and I’ll have the font blown up bigger than normal, and I’ll just edit in there, and then I’ll just take that and then I’ll copy that and paste that into WordPress. It’s just easier for me to do it that way. So I just like it that way. You know, everybody has their own little thing. That’s my little thing. And I think it’s because of my vision.

[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: And in terms of kind of getting the recording software to work and things like that, how do those UIs function for you?

[00:15:19] Bud Kraus: Yeah, pretty good. The problem I have with learning something new and complicated is that, I think it’s like everybody, quite frankly, I get confused and try to figure out where’s what. And like I was using, I use Descript, and it just took me quite a while to figure out, how do I do this? How do I do that? But like anything else, once I learn it, it’s pretty solid and it gets easier.

Now I do tend to blow things up to make it bigger. And my wife is always telling me, I can’t use your computer because stuff is too big. Now, I don’t think it’s too big, but she does. And when I look at other people’s computers, then I realise, no, it’s bigger than theirs.

[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’re in the era of Gutenberg. It sounds like you’ve been using WordPress for a fairly long time, presumably before Gutenberg. What’s your opinion on whether or not that was a move in the right direction? In other words, is it favorable? Is it more straightforward for you to create a post? I know that you said in the scenario for a podcast, you’re writing it elsewhere and copying and pasting it in. But with other things like, I don’t know, laying out content and writing paragraphs and things, do you think it’s a good experience? Did we go in the right direction there?

[00:16:18] Bud Kraus: That’s a very hard question for me to answer. I’ll answer it in a couple of different ways. One, as far as accessibility goes, I’m no expert in this. I am not an accessibility expert. Am I a stakeholder? We all are. But I can’t answer it in that regard.

But from a more technical standpoint, because I write technical articles for Kinsta, Hostinger, others, that I find it to be difficult. I know I was told it’s not supposed to be easy, so it certainly doesn’t match the easy. Yeah, and that has nothing to do with my vision. It’s just, I feel it’s just complicated, even though I’ve learned quite a bit of the technical side of this stuff. I’m not trying to be cute here, but I’m trying to be cute, and I just can’t answer that question that’s going to provide any value so.

[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: I was kind of wondering if there was a thing which, if you could click your fingers and make it appear in the Block Editor or the Gutenberg interface, which you would, and I don’t know that you’ve got got an answer to that.

[00:17:15] Bud Kraus: I, let me think. No, I don’t think so. No. And I use Elementor too. So I think from a logic standpoint, Elementor seems to be easier for me. What I just don’t like is a lot of confusion. Too much information built into a UI is a real problem for me.

Nathan, the funny thing is I feel like I have a special filter on the world that other people don’t have. This is another one of these blessings, that gives me the ability to understand what works and what doesn’t work without having to ask somebody because it’s just built in.

Now, the thing about disability or this field in general, which is huge, it’s very idiosyncratic. So my setup is good for me, but it may not work for somebody else. And it’s very hard to, as those who keep accessibility in mind, and hopefully it’s everybody. It’s a very difficult subject because how do we design our systems, our content so that the greatest number of people can access this information, or whatever, on the largest number of devices. I mean, that’s what accessibility to me is about.

[00:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: It’s curious that you said, I think you said at the beginning that your condition is one which will deteriorate over time.

[00:18:31] Bud Kraus: Well, macular degeneration, generally, can get worse over time. But fortunately, for reasons that we don’t need to get into, since 1992 it’s been very stable, which I’m really fortunate because trust me, I don’t want it to get any worse than this. I don’t need another, that much of a blessing.

[00:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was wondering from that, whether or not the accessibility side of WordPress is something that you lean into. Do you attend those kind of, I don’t know, WP Accessibility Day, those kind of events?

[00:18:59] Bud Kraus: No, it just doesn’t really interest me. You know, back in like 1999, 2000, I was teaching a course at Pratt Institute in New York called Accessible Web Design. And it was way ahead of its time. And the concepts I was teaching were basically concepts because the browsers and technology just wasn’t there yet. So you’d have to say, well, one day, and one day did happen in large measure.

And then I started realising, I just didn’t want to like make a career out of teaching this or testing or, you know, I started to meet people in the field and I just said, I don’t really like this. I mean, just because I’m, I have a disability doesn’t mean I have to like the field of accessible design, you know, accessibility.

[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. You are wearing a WordCamp Montclair t-shirt, which kind of tells me that not only are you attending this event, WordCamp US, but you’re also attending other ones as well. Is that a big part of your life? If it is, how accessible are things like this event? Do you come here fully expecting of yourself that you’ll have a full experience the same way that everybody else does?

[00:19:59] Bud Kraus: Well, I have a good experience, but it is not the same way everybody else does. For example, I can’t see the screens at all. And when they’re doing stuff, the slides, I’m just listening, okay. It’s sort of like, I watch TV a lot that way too. I hear things. Unless I got really close, I’m not going to be able to see what’s on the screen. If I took a picture of something that’s really important, yeah, that’ll help.

But generally speaking, that doesn’t work for me. And then it could be kind of a, yes, I’ve gone to many WordCamps, but they’re all sort of the same in terms of the issues. And I don’t even think of them as issues anymore. I just think of it as like, we’re all different. This is the way I’m different. And talking about this stuff, quite frankly is like talking about being right-handed. Would you do an interview of me being right-handed?

[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, fascinating. I guess, from my perspective, because I just don’t, I can’t prize that open my own life, it’s really intriguing to sort of try to have some sort of understanding of how it differs from my experience to your experience. And I guess for you it’s, this is how I live.

[00:20:58] Bud Kraus: Yeah. But Nathan, you know, vision is a spectrum. It’s a continuum. It isn’t just everybody looks at things the same way. No. So I don’t think, alright, I’m like sort of on one end of the spectrum, I get it, but everybody looks at things differently. And I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean that literally. So I don’t think of it anymore much as a handicap, you know, other than the fact that, yeah, that’s a pain in the neck sometimes. And sometimes you find yourself doing some foolish things.

And I think the hardest thing for me at these events is that I won’t know who I’m talking to until about five minutes after I’m talking to them, and I figured out by looking at their shape, stuff like that, that I can, oh, I’m talking to Nathan Wrigley, or your accent, or something like that.

[00:21:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You’re obviously quite keen on the sort of education side of things though because you’re writing tutorials. I’ll link in the show notes to one that you wrote for Smashing Magazine, which is no mean feat. Getting in there is really rather impressive. So well done for that.

But you’re also obviously turning up two events like this. And it sounds from what you said as if this is content that you’ve done before. So very keen on that, even though it may be talking about, you were describing there, it’s like talking about whether you’re right-handed. You’ve put together this presentation in which you’re going to share these different bits and pieces about how you make amendments and adjustments to WordPress and the operating system and so on. So do you enjoy the education side of it?

[00:22:16] Bud Kraus: Oh, absolutely. I’m a teacher at heart. I mean, you know, that’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years. And even in the writings that I do, they’re basically, it’s a different way of teaching. Now the talk that I’m giving though here, the funny thing is, as I’ve said, I’m sort of like cool to the idea to be honest about it. There are other talks I’d rather give than this one, but this is the talk that everybody seems to be interested in. And I get that.

And when you come up with a topic called using low vision is a tool to help me teach WordPress, that’s a winner because you got two things in there that everybody loves. One, we love disability, and two, we love teaching WordPress. So two weird things got put into one title.

[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a hit.

[00:22:58] Bud Kraus: It got to be a hit, right.

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: What would be the presentation that you would do?

[00:23:01] Bud Kraus: Ah. The one that I’m threatening to do instead of this one, because I keep saying, I don’t wanna do this one, let me do another one. There’s two.

One is, burnt out on web design, what your future career could be, which is my story.

And the other one is, show me the money, how to get sponsors to financially help with your podcast, event, whatever. I like that topic, show me the money.

[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Paraphrasing, just a minute, what are the nuggets? Because I’m curious about that one.

[00:23:27] Bud Kraus: Oh, come on. You could teach me, okay?

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: What are the nuggets in there though?

[00:23:32] Bud Kraus: Well, in my case with my podcast, I’ve been sort of lucky in that they came to me and said, we’d like to sponsor you. Which is a shock because when I started the podcast a year and a half ago, or actually the idea was, it’s now two years old, I said, I didn’t care if anybody ever listened, I didn’t care if anybody ever sponsored. And then of course, over time, I did care.

But I never thought of my show ever being sponsored. I said, I’ll just do it. And then I started realising, hey, this takes a lot of time, should get paid for this. And, you know, I feel just, if I have a second or two say how fortunate I am to be a part of all of this because at my advanced age, to be in this community with such smart, brilliant, whatever, people that are friendly. When I talk to people my age who are generally retired or retiring and, their world gets smaller and mine gets bigger.

[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s interesting.

[00:24:25] Bud Kraus: So I’m really, really lucky about that.

[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I don’t know what your age is, but I am of a certain age, and I’m kind of feeling at the moment that there’s this whole thing which everybody wants to talk about, which is AI. And I’m kind of feeling as if that train has already, you know, that ship has sailed for me. Can’t invest all of the time and what have you to learn all of the different bits and pieces. It’s like there’s another bus coming. I don’t know what you think about that.

[00:24:47] Bud Kraus: Well, I’ll tell you what it is, for me, it’s been a career extender, because I am now writing at a level for Kinsta, technical articles that I could not otherwise write. And because of my use of, and if you will, mastery of AI, I’ve been able to code things that I could not do before. So I’ve always had sort of, for the longest time, because I taught great foundation of HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, whatever. So I know this stuff, okay.

But to elevate that knowledge, to create stuff now that is much more complicated, sort of like junior development oriented stuff or maybe a little bit beyond that. That is amazing. And it’s because of AI.

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating.

[00:25:30] Bud Kraus: It’s extending what I can do.

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you feel like you’ve got a new lease of life there.

[00:25:34] Bud Kraus: Yeah, a bit. So I don’t have to keep writing the same things over and over about how to create a post. You know, I’ve done that. I want to be challenged to learn new things, and AI is helping me do that. And we’re teaching AI, and AI is teaching us. So it’s really cool.

[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: Your presentation, is it today or tomorrow?

[00:25:51] Bud Kraus: Well, it’s tomorrow.

[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: I was going to say, you’re looking very calm for somebody that has a presentation later today.

[00:25:56] Bud Kraus: Well, you know, I’ve been around the block. I’m not going to be nervous. Now what I do have to do is I’ve got to do some more memorisation. And that’s what I talked about always being prepared. I just can’t go in there and read the slides. It’s not going to happen. So I have to really know what the slides are, what the order is, and what the words are on the screen. I don’t have to read those words, but I have to know the ideas behind all this.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: So in some sense, you’ve memorised it more or less. Oh, that’s interesting. So you’ve really applied thought to every, more or less, every sentence that comes out of your mouth.

[00:26:24] Bud Kraus: Basically.

[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: But you don’t get nervous.

[00:26:26] Bud Kraus: We’re with friends.

[00:26:28] Nathan Wrigley: I would get so nervous.

[00:26:29] Bud Kraus: At least I like to think so.

[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I agree. Every time I’ve been to a presentation, even when the person delivering it has been quite nervous, there’s always been a very positive sentiment in the room.

[00:26:39] Bud Kraus: I’ll tell you why I don’t get nervous, I don’t see their faces.

[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.

[00:26:42] Bud Kraus: So if you don’t see their faces. There’s so many advantages of vision impairment. I know it sounds crazy, but if you don’t see their faces, then you don’t see their reactions. Now, of course, that’s a negative too. But then you don’t get nervous.

[00:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely fascinating. Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. It will be out on wordpress.tv at some point. Typically now they come out really soon. These flagship events, they turn them around really quickly.

[00:27:06] Bud Kraus: Well, I don’t know when this is coming out, but this is going to be live streamed around the world.

[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Is it?

[00:27:10] Bud Kraus: Yeah. So one person can watch.

[00:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: The point being, dear listener, that if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you want to follow on the talk, the presentation that Bud has given at WordCamp US, by the way, maybe the quickest way to do that is to just Google, either WordCamp US 2025. Or Google, using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. That’s the other short circuit if you like. You’ll be able to see exactly what it is that Bud delivered.

I have no further questions, so unless you’ve got something to add, I will say thank you very much for chatting to me.

[00:27:40] Bud Kraus: Well, thank you Nathan. And you know I’m a big fan of what you do and thanks for having me on.

[00:27:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much.

On the podcast today we have Bud Kraus.

Bud was diagnosed with macular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read. Despite these challenges, Bud’s peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.

Bud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often-overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.

Bud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard-to-navigate interfaces to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.

Bud’s story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It’s full of real-world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress, Bud’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025

JAWS, Job Access With Speech software

Pratt Institute

Descript

Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress, Bud’s post on Smashing Magazine