#187 – June Liu and David Denedo on Making the Web Accessible: The Mission Behind WP Accessibility Day

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, making the web accessible, and the mission behind WP Accessibility Day.

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So on the podcast today, we have June Liu and David Denedo.

Both June and David are key members of the WP Accessibility Day organizing team, a global, volunteer driven, event focused on improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.

June serves as the marketing team co-lead, and works with sponsors, bringing her background in project management to keep the events efforts on track.

David, a web designer and content creator based in London, contributes to the marketing and post-event teams, with his interest in web accessibility stemming from his personal experience as a visually impaired user.

WP Accessibility Day has grown significantly in the past few years, uniting a large international group of volunteers, and organizers, to drive awareness and practical change in web accessibility.

The event is powered by a host of teams, marketing, sponsors, tech and vendor, post-event, translation, speakers, and more, ensuring that everything from live captioning to sign language interpretation is in place.

We begin by learning about June and David’s unique paths to accessibility advocacy. One through direct lived experience, and the other through supporting a loved one with cognitive challenges. Their stories highlight why accessibility can’t be an afterthought, and how events like WP Accessibility Day are raising awareness in this important area.

We discuss what attendees can expect at this year’s event happening from the 15th of October, 2025. It’s free, fully virtual, and runs for 24 hours, making space for a diverse range of speakers and topics.

Whether you’re interested in the moral, legal or technical cases for accessibility, there’s something for you here, including sessions on accessible design, risk management for agencies, legal compliance, and demonstrations of assistive technologies.

June and David share how the event format, a combination of prerecorded talks and live chat, mixes polished content with real time engagement. Plus how translation and community involvement are key to its growing impact.

If you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you’re motivated by global collaboration or personal stories, 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 June Liu and David Denedo.

I am joined on the podcast by two fabulous guests. I’ve got June Liu and David Denedo. Hello both. How are you both doing?

[00:03:58] June Jiu: Hi there.

[00:03:59] David Denedo: Hello. I’m doing all right.

[00:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it’s very nice to have you both with us. The intention of today’s podcast is to draw attention to something which well, I’m sure many of you will know about. If you don’t know about it, I certainly hope that by the end of this, not only do you know about it, but you are highly engaged, and hopefully going to attend and all of those kind of things, maybe even contribute some of your time, you never know.

It’s called WP Accessibility Day, and we’re going to get into that in a moment. Before we do that, I just want to get the little bio, the introduction from both of you, one at a time, just telling us who you are, what your interest is in WordPress and accessibility, I guess.

So we’ll keep it nice and short and sweet. So I’ll go to June first. Just let us know who you are, June.

[00:04:39] June Jiu: Thank you, Nathan. I’m June, I serve on the organising team for WP Accessibility Day as the marketing team co-lead, and I also work on the sponsors team.

My background is mostly project management, so my forte right now is helping the team coordinate tasks, and keeping the initiatives on track. Yeah, I coordinate between the sponsors and the marketing team to get the sponsor page prepared. So that’s basically my work with WPAD.

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s great. And David, let’s go to you next. Same question really.

[00:05:11] David Denedo: Hi, I’m David. I’m visually impaired, so that’s why I love accessibility. I work in London as a web designer and a content creator, and I’m part of the WP Accessibility Day organising team, as part of the post-event people. But I’m also in the marketing team, just jumping around, and at least trying to put as much as I can into web accessibility.

Yeah, I got into web accessibility mainly because of some talks I had two years ago from the WP Accessibility Day, and that just encouraged me. And then here we are two years later.

[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So, WP Accessibility Day, one thing that just jumped out at me straight away from what you were both talking about there, you both talked about, I’m on the, and then you mentioned a team. That implies that there’s quite a lot of you in the background.

So just to give credit where credit’s due, I think it’s always important to make sure that we credit not just the two of you, because there’s probably a lot of people behind this as well. I don’t want to go down the route of missing anybody out. So I wonder if it’s possible for us to just mention the kind of teams and things like that. And if there are any people in particular that you’ve been working with that you do wish to name, caveat emptor, dear listener, I apologise on behalf of everybody on this panel. If we miss anybody’s name out, sorry about that. But let’s go for the, how many teams there are and how big an enterprise is this these days?

[00:06:39] June Jiu: I don’t think I’ve ever counted how many teams there are, but I’ll list some of them. And David, add yours if I miss any, please.

There is a volunteer team that’s, right now, pivotal. That’s their work right now in preparing the event. The event is on October 15th, so we’re just about a month away. So the volunteer team is very active right now in onboarding the volunteers.

Then we have the tech and vendors. And those are also very active. They work closely with the volunteer team to prepare the day of. So they’re the ones that prepare the Zoom platform for us. So making sure that it all runs well.

Then we have website, APAC, post event, translation, sponsors, marketing. What else? I feel like there’s a few others that I’m missing. But there is a huge team behind Amber, Bet and Joe, working and making sure that we can make the event as smooth as possible, and take some of the load off of them.

[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: The Amber, the Bet and the Joe that you just mentioned, we have got Amber Hinds, Bet Hannon and Joe Dolson. So there’s three names. Do you have any recollection whether they were the people that kind of kickstarted the event, whenever that was? Because if that was the case, it sounds like it’s gone gangbusters since then with lots of people joining on, and you two being some examples.

[00:07:56] June Jiu: We do have a pretty big team this year. And yes, you’re right, the history is that Joe Dolson did start WP Accessibility Day. I don’t recall all of the specifics, but I think the second year, Bet, I think it might’ve started with Bet and Joe, and then Amber also came on soon after that.

But we’re in our fifth year. It’s very exciting. I joined last year as an organiser and it was a point in my time where I was returning to work. So finding WPAD was kind of a sweet spot for me to test out my skill sets again, get used to being out in the public, so I have a soft spot for them.

[00:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Okay, so there’s a few that we’ve rattled off. David, I don’t know if you can fill in any gaps that might have been left there. If so, go now.

[00:08:42] David Denedo: Yeah, I think those are the main ones that were involved. And I would say Amber Hinds, when she came on board, she brought in a lot of organisation because, you know, with Joe, Joe understands the technical bits of things, but he’s not really so organised. So when she came in, that’s why the team grew exponentially from 2022, I believe when she joined. And then the year after, things just kept spiraling. And then now we have a massive team with lots of volunteers, everybody’s happy to help.

The other thing that is quite nice is that there was a nice spread of people who are volunteering. So it’s not just maybe from one region or one country. We are a very nice spread of people, so that’s really nice. So from different parts, from Asia, from Africa, from the Americas and all of that, they’re all wide base.

[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: That’s amazing. Everybody from all over the place. That’s really lovely.

David, in your introduction, in your bio, you described that you are kind of eating your own dog food a little bit here in that, I can’t remember the exact phrasing that you had around your eyes. How did you describe the condition that you have, if that’s the right word?

[00:09:50] David Denedo: Okay, yeah. So I am visually impaired, so I have very high myopia and high astigmatism. I also struggle to see myself, so that’s one reason why I got really interested when I saw how people are able to make the web more accessible. Because I grew up in a background where we had to adapt to so many stressful things, like there wasn’t really much help for people with accessibility needs.

So I didn’t really know there were ways to help people out. Until I came into the whole system and I realised that, oh wow, so you can actually do this to help somebody else. Because I was always struggling, most times I couldn’t see the screen. So I’m always like relying on other people to tell me what’s in front of me, what’s on the screen, and all of that.

But then when you start to see that, oh yeah, we can use a screen reader, you can use screen magnifier, you can do this, you can do that, you can just improve a little bit on your website, or even on the reality, makes things more accessible. I was like, wow, I’ve been living under the rock basically.

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I’m just wondering, June, if you have a similar story to tell in that, is there anything that you would like to share in that regard?

[00:11:01] June Jiu: I do. My mother had a stroke, and from that she had vascular dementia. And being her caregiver for that many years, and seeing the decline in her loss of independence, because she wasn’t able to navigate the medical system by herself anymore. It was kind of, I learned everything in hindsight. I wish I had the knowledge that I have today to have helped her like 8, 10 years ago. But that drew me in.

I was telling you how I came back into the workforce, and one of the things that somebody said to me was, hey, there’s this free event. It’s online, you don’t have to leave your house, just try it out. And it was WPAD. And when I was listening to the talks, I was like, yeah, wait a second, you mean that websites can be laid out differently so that it would be easier for somebody to navigate it, even with a mental decline?

And it’s those simple, to us, it initially could be simple, but in the back end it might not be so simple. But just having her read through an online PDF, you know, it was difficult for her to hit the right area, because the PDF lines were so tiny. And her eye, hand coordination was reduced, so she’s not able to hit those lines to fill in the PDF.

So for me it was the acknowledgement of, oh my gosh, it doesn’t have to be this way going forward. So it’s me trying to learn as much as I can to direct my future clients into a direction that gives better accessibility to all, and not just their one demographic.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious that you’ve both got two stories where the end of it, the target, if you like, is the same, but how you’ve arrived at the things are entirely different.

David, a very personal story about your own life. And June, well, another personal story, but viewed through the prism of somebody else. Almost like standing over somebody’s shoulder and being able to ascertain, well, this person’s not getting what they could out of the internet.

And it strikes me that if you rewound the clock, I don’t know, let’s say 30 years ago before the internet was in any way, shape, or form common, but you could describe what would be available in 30 years time. And you could say, well, so many people, they’d have this little device in their hand, and there’d be these machines where there’d be screens on desktops and things like that.

At that moment, you would be thinking to yourself, this is literally the perfect technology to help people who, let’s say for example, are struggling to see. Are unable to get out of the house. There may be an aspect of their body which doesn’t function in the way that your body or my body might function.

You would describe that and you’d think, oh, this is like manna from heaven. This is the perfect thing. But it never turned out that way. The internet went in a way entirely leaving those people behind, I think, which was such a lost opportunity.

So we’re kind of 25 years or whatever it is into the internet, and we’re now going back and filling in all of the gaps that probably, with the benefit of hindsight, should never have been left.

I mean, I don’t know that there’s any question in there, but it’s curious that that one technology which could have made the lives of so many people so much more straightforward, really hasn’t serviced those people particularly well until events like this come along and educate the rest of us in how to do it.

[00:14:23] June Jiu: I think, Nathan, you hit two big points. Everyone’s journey with accessibility is very personal, and unless you experienced it firsthand, or even secondhand in my case, you don’t really see that impact.

And the second part is that the second nail that you hit is that a lot of times it becomes an afterthought. Accessibility becomes the afterthought. I think that with an event like WPAD, we want it to become the foundational, so we’re hoping to make that change.

[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: For example, I’m imagining, again harking back to how the internet could have been, we’ve now got a technology where a small rectangle held in your hand, with a few clicks of a few buttons can enable you to more or less have anything delivered to your front door, in a very short space of time. Which is like, how incredible is that, that that is even possible?

And so this is the perfect answer to people, let’s say for example, who struggle to get out of the front door, and navigate the shops and what have you.

And yet we’re faced with a situation where that sublimely cool technology is impenetrable, and unavailable, to many people because it never got baked in as a requirement, and we can come to that later. David, I’m sorry, I think I interrupted.

[00:15:36] David Denedo: Oh no. Yeah, what you said is quite right. There is an imbalance in the way things are getting better, but it’s getting better for a certain set of people, but leaving some other people behind. So that is the problem.

With the web, it was improving at a very fast rate in terms of how to build the web, but somewhere along the line, people forgot that the whole essence of worldwide web, the man who created the W3C consortium, who basically created the web, the father of the web, his whole idea was that the web should be accessible to all. That was his vision, his goal from the very start.

But as people are trying to push the boundaries, sometimes they forget, well, it is quite normal that sometimes unless you are experiencing a certain problem, you will not find a solution to it. So now that we are bringing the awareness to people, then they’re now finding out, okay, we forgot this certain set of people, let’s now incorporate them into our thinking, into our design, into everything.

So that is one nice thing about having a conference like WPAD, to help spread awareness to people. Because if you’ve never experienced a certain problem, for example, you’ve never been blind or you’ve never had something with your mobility. You may not really appreciate the struggles of those people. But when they’re able to express it out and explain to you in these conferences, then you can now get that third party understanding, and at least you can incorporate accessibility into your own lifestyle.

[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I have a question around that, because I am in the position where my eyes, despite the fact I wear glasses, once the glasses are on my nose, my eyes, functionally, I think you would describe them as normal, and I have good ish hearing, and my body functions. And so, David, you’ve basically just described me.

It can be, it has been hard to imagine, what is the lived experience of people who are not in the same boat as I am?

And I did wonder if a part of WPAD, I did wonder if a part of that was that educational piece? Whether it was explaining to people, web developers, people who may not be accustomed to what the conference is about, and what the summit will, you know, the educational pieces. I wondered if there was a piece where you explained, okay, this is the setup that somebody using a screen reader, this is what it feels like to them when they’re on the internet. This is what it would feel like, for example, I don’t know, if you are using a puff and sip system or something like that.

So I don’t know if you are providing content like that, but I’d be curious to know whether you explain what the lived experience would be for people who may benefit as a result of the tech talks in the conference.

[00:18:34] David Denedo: Yeah, so from what we have planned, there are a few of the conference talks that will reflect about accessibility. I think one of them is by Dennis, he’s going to show how a screen reader user will access a website. And then there are also talks about post-production of videos. So some people will incorporate the talks in, or at least talk about the experiences, but it may not be like a full on description.

But yeah, I’ve seen a few of the talks that will be happening and they will be incorporating some of the disabilities that we know, like colorblindness, and then like audio and other things. So that will help people to get an awareness of what disabilities are out there, and how to incorporate that into building a more accessible system.

[00:19:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really interesting. I suppose the old adage is, you know, a picture says the same as a thousand words or something like that. And being able to perceive what’s going on. I’ve always found that incredibly motivating, because immediately I can see how the internet is a more difficult place than a thousand words could describe and what have you.

So, okay, so that’s interesting. And then moving on to the conference itself, I’m presuming that this is aimed squarely at people already using WordPress as their content management system, their website builder. But it is curious because, I don’t know exactly where you land on this, maybe what I’m about to say doesn’t fit at all, but I’m presuming the conference is designed to enable everybody to get some way along the road of producing an accessible website.

But presumably also the audience is a little bit of, trying to do what I’ve just described, make the case, the moral case, the legal case for needing to do it as well. So it’s the tech side of how to do it, as well as the sort of the moral and the legal obligations that might sort of follow that in train.

[00:20:32] June Jiu: Yeah, there is one session that I think you might find interesting along that line, is that it’s talking about accessibility as a risk management for agencies and for business owners. So I think that in particular, I have found it most interesting. With a background in project management, I’ve often had conversations where somebody will say to me, but why do I need to have it assessable? And then you’d have to take that pause and go, okay. But I think that to have the angle of risk management is certainly something that business owners will be able to relate to a little bit better.

We also have another one that is talking about what features you should be on a lookout for so that you can kind of mitigate the legal portion of it. I’m not saying that you can avoid it completely, but at least you’re more aware of it.

So there’s that one and, of course, our keynote speaker is Vitaly Friedman, from Smashing Magazine. He’s going to come at it from the UI, UX portion of it. So it’s not just all on the development, but it’s also on different aspects of website building and different viewpoints on business and ownership of a website.

[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because there are many threads there aren’t there. If you were just to take the technical side, you could probably do a conference that lasted many, many weeks about the technicalities of how to do it.

But it’s curious that you’ve also leaned into the things like, well, the compulsion, the kind of maybe the advent of the ambulance chasing lawyer, dare I say it, who has realised, latched onto the fact that the European Accessibility Act over this side of the Atlantic is now a thing. There is no longer just a moral component to doing the accessibility work on your website. There is now increasingly a big legal hammer, which could be deployed.

And so that alone, I presume will draw a certain audience who, you know, if the only thing that they want to hear about is how to mitigate that problem, well, maybe that’s not the ideal motivation for it, but nevertheless, it is a bit of a carrot and stick, and it will bring some people into the arena, which is good.

[00:22:41] June Jiu: And here’s why I’d like to give a shout out to a team that I forgot, the speaker team. They’re the ones that put together the application, and they vetted through all the applications to see what would be more interesting for everybody.

The rating system is, when they go through the rating system, they kind of make it anonymous of who the presenter would be. So it makes it, you are really looking at what the topic is being talked about, rather than who might be presenting. And that gives us an edge in finding topics that might not be as well known and from areas that are less featured.

So we do have a couple of speakers that are coming from the continent of Africa, and those are always very interesting to hear. In the past, because of the location and the technical availability, there had been technical issues. But this year we’re having it so that the sessions are all prerecorded. So that will kind of help with the presentation of it, the clarity. But each of the speakers will be in the chat and they’ll be available to answer questions in the chat.

So I think that’s an interesting fold into this year’s event, to have that feature in there so that the speaker is not just presenting, but they’re in the chat room answering questions. I think that adds another layer to the event.

[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think what’s really nice about that as well is that if everything’s prerecorded, the speaker will get the chance to create and then re-edit, and then adapt and modify. And what you end up with hopefully is the best version of that talk.

With the best will in the world, some people are not as great as others at doing live things. You know, they go down rabbit holes, and they lose their train of thought or what have you. This completely gets rid of that problem. They can do it as many times as they like and give you the best version.

But also that lovely aspect of, they suddenly become available to have a conversation in the chat, whereas before, they was presenting, you know, and presumably needed to go and have a bit of a lie down afterwards. Whereas in this situation, much more relaxed, you can ask them the questions.

I really appreciate that format. I think that’s actually, that’s my preferred way of a summit, kind of like this, the Accessibility Day in this case, being put together. I think that’s very forward thinking. And I hope that you continue doing it that way because I think the presenters probably appreciate it. Your audience will appreciate it, because it will be polished, and also you get to chat with the person involved. Anything on that, David?

[00:25:11] David Denedo: Yeah. Another thing we forgot to talk about is the translation team. So as the talks are being presented, there are also some nice volunteers who are translating it into other languages to have as much diversity as possible. Because some people, English is not their first language, so we have a team trying to convert to like French. We have the one for Spanish. There are also some other ones, even like Hebrew and so many other ones. So it’s a very nice feeling to have so many translations and everybody is doing their bit.

That is one thing I love about WP Accessibility, the entire organising team is the fact that everybody’s skill level, it doesn’t matter your skill level, you can always put in something. So that is something great. Whether you are a web designer, you are just a business owner, you can sponsor the event. If you are good with multilingual, you can be part of the translation. You can apply to speak.

The whole talks is not all technical, like you already mentioned. The talks are varied, so we talk about risk management, we talk about designers can give their own bits. People who are in business can give the business case for accessibility. So it’s all, it’s a lovely spread and I really love it.

[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: There really is a lovely spread. I mean, firstly, one thing that I should have done right top of the show, which I didn’t, and I will mention it because I record a preamble before we actually start talking, one thing I will do is I’ll read into the record the URL. But I’ll do that now as well.

So the URL is fabulous, by the way. It’s just ideal. If you are returning customer, if you like, it’s wpaccessibility.day. Just one more time, wpaccessibility, the regular spelling, no underscores, no hyphens or anything like that, dot day.

And then as a subdomain you are going to put in the year. So in this case it’s going to be 2 0 2 5, 2025.wpaccessibility.day. And you’re going to find all the different bits and pieces over there.

And one of the things that I noticed about the getting involved side of things is, yeah, there’s the whole sponsorship thing. So you can become a sponsor if you’d like to do that. But also you can volunteer, you can become a media partner. If you feel philanthropic and you just want to donate some of your money into the project, that is also an option. And then there’s a whole tab for the attendees as well. It’s under community. There’s an attendee section as well.

So it sounds like it’s not just this little event which flicks on for a couple of days and then turns off again. I mean, certainly from your side, it sounds like there’s a whole fun community of things happening in the background.

And really that’s the glue that binds a successful project together. If it was all very uninteresting and dry and a bit boring and you were all feeling under pressure, it wouldn’t have so many legs, it wouldn’t be able to run for this many years. But I’m guessing that you’ve had nice experiences, right, in the background?

[00:28:04] June Jiu: Oh, yes. Yes. We have a lot of fun. But thank you for mentioning those links.

[00:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think that’s wonderful. So again, go and check that out.

The other thing to say though is, let’s talk about how it’s actually happening. Obviously you’ve described that it’s going to be prerecorded videos. How are you making that content available? What’s going to be the platform of choice, or how are you going to get it?

Is there a way that you can, I don’t know, for example, download all of the bits and pieces so you can watch them in your own time? Is it an event which is spanning a single day, you know, a 24 hour time?

[00:28:35] June Jiu: Yeah, we do say that it is 24 hours, but all the content and the videos, they’re going to be available for replay after we go through the post-event production. Either from each subdomain, as you mentioned, the 2025 will be available on the 2025.wpaccessibility.day.

Last year’s event is available on the 2024.wpaccessibility.day. So you can rewatch them. It’s also available through YouTube. So if you need some background noise, I often do it. I just turn on that and let it roll.

I have to say, it is a lot of information to absorb, but I do find it to be very resourceful. I know that one of David’s work this year is to put in chapters for these past event videos. So that has been very helpful to me when I find the relevant video from the past. And I said, I remember somebody saying something about that. Now with the chapters there, it’s much easier to navigate and find it. So good work, David. Thank you.

[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. Good work. But what’s this, in the show notes that were shared before we actually joined the call, it describes, it says here, and I don’t know which one of you wrote it, but it says, the event will be hosted through Zoom events. And Zoom is capitalised, so I presume it’s the platform Zoom that we’re all familiar with. I don’t know what a Zoom event is. Does that differ from a regular Zoom call? Is there some key difference?

[00:29:59] June Jiu: Yes. It’s different from like a Zoom webinar or a Zoom call. It’s a platform that has a lobby. You’re registering on our site, but then on event day you’ll be able to go into the Zoom event.

There’ll be a lobby and there’ll be a chat room, that’s where you can find all the information for the event. So, it’s not like a traditional webinar where there’s just one link in order to go and join it, to join that session, or that sector of sections. So now you can go in and when that hour pops up, that session would pop up.

[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Right. So you go to this one central place, and everything’s kind of bound in this one, so as soon as you’re in, you’re in, basically, and you don’t have to keep clicking links in emails to find the latest session, which is going live.

[00:30:44] June Jiu: Exactly.

[00:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s really nice. Dave, anything to add to that?

[00:30:47] David Denedo: Yeah. And you also have access to like swag. Everything will be in the event, so you can get some of the sponsor swag, you can chat with the speakers, you can chat with other event members, all within the same platform. So not having to jump from one platform to another platform to chat and then come back. You can lose people that way, but now everything all packaged together.

[00:31:12] June Jiu: I wanted to give a shout out to the platform itself. It allows us to do live captioning. A lot of times with webinars, it is just automated caption. We actually do have live captioners typing into Zoom. That is another layer to WP Accessibility Day that is not a feature in other events.

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: No kidding, yeah.

[00:31:33] June Jiu: Yes. And the other big one, expense for us is the American Sign Language interpreters. So they will be also on hand on event day, and there’s a team of them that will be available to us, and they do the ASL.

This year one of our speakers is from Australia and he will be bringing in Australian Sign Language, which is different from American Sign Language. So there’s another layer to the accessibility. We understand either British Sign Language or American Sign Language but, yeah, there’s Australian Sign Language too.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: You drop this as if it’s really straightforward, but when my head starts spinning on the technicalities there, the idea of injecting real time, typed transcriptions, somehow overlaying that into the video, there’s a whole technical piece there.

And then you’ve got a sign language person. That’s a whole nother layer as well. That all needs, presumably, I don’t know if that’s going to be done live or filmed. Maybe there’s an opportunity.

[00:32:33] June Jiu: It’s live.

[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. So all of that, there are lots and lots of moving parts here.

[00:32:37] June Jiu: That’s why we have the technical and vendor team, and the volunteer team. They’re pivotal on event day to have those two teams in place.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask, because I know there’ll be some people that are curious about the, how to describe it, the business status, let’s put it that way. And maybe this is not something that either of you can answer, I don’t know.

What’s the structure of WP Accessibility Day? So, for example, if I was to donate, in the UK we call these things charities. I think in the US the correct term is non-profit. So if I was to donate, do I have some sort of assurance that the money isn’t going to end up in some, I don’t even want to say the words because I know that nobody’s ethics are this poorly thought through, but I’m going to say it anyway. Just want to make sure that the money doesn’t end in somebody’s back pocket.

Where did the donations end up? How is the structure of this organisation ensuring that everything is out in the open and clear and easy to understand?

[00:33:28] June Jiu: Well, this year WordPress Accessibility Day was recognised by IRS as the 501 C3 public charity. So based upon that, a hundred percent of our income that comes in goes right back into the event.

Organisers and volunteers are not paid. Every one of us who are working on this is out of the goodness of our heart, and what time availability that we have.

The one caveat I will say, some of our translators are paid because translation is an income based business. And this is a recent development. In the past we’ve had to ask them to please donate their time to do the translation. But now we have a little bit more security to be able to pay them.

People who have the ability to speak multiple languages, look into the translation because if you aren’t able to participate as an organiser or a volunteer, donating your time to translate or being paid for be translators for us is a huge difference for us to bring all these sessions available to a greater audience.

[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think everybody would understand that there’s, that is how that industry works, isn’t it? When you go to a WordCamp, for example, and you see the people doing the live captioning, or you see the people standing on the stage and they’re doing the sign language, I think it’s understood that that is what they do for a living.

[00:34:51] June Jiu: And I would be remiss not to give credit to our sponsors too. We have many sponsors who are repeat sponsors year after year, and they support us with their sponsorship. We are very appreciative of that.

This year we have some new ones and a lot of repeating ones from every range. Our higher level are of course now closed, but we still have the bronze level, which is at a $500, or a micro sponsor which is at $150. And the difference between that is the Bronze has a webpage, a dedicated webpage for their company, and the micro sponsor has a logo on our sponsor page.

[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: So as of recording, and maybe that will keep going right up to the deadline, I don’t know, so if what you’ve heard has made you feel that you’d like to be involved on a sponsorship level, bronze is available, that one is $500, and there’s a micro one. And obviously you can go onto the 2025 Accessibility Day website and discover for yourself what’s available in there.

So we found out what’s happening. We found out why it’s being done. We found out some of the people that are being involved. I suppose what we ought to do at this point is drive people toward the schedule.

Well, you’ve announced it already, but let’s just make sure we’re doing it again. The date for this event is when?

[00:36:03] David Denedo: So it’ll be happening on October 15th to the 16th, and it’ll be 24 hour long event. So it’s going to go right up for 24 hours. We have the speakers all in the schedule, so you can go ahead and check it out. The link will be in the shownotes.

[00:36:19] Nathan Wrigley: It will. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So the 15th of October, it’s a 24 hour event. So I don’t know if you start in the sort of Pacific neck of the woods, that seems to be the traditional way that things are done. So Australia, they’re the sort of first people to receive the content, and then it just goes around the globe. And maybe the people in, on the west coast of the US and Hawaii and what have you, they get the content more towards the end of the day. I assume that’s how it’s working.

But if you go to the URL that we mentioned earlier and just add forward slash schedule to it, you will be able to see through opening remarks from Joe Dolson right at the beginning of the day, right through the keynotes and everything, to the closing remarks, or at least the last presentation, which is happening some 23 or so hours later.

I think that’s all the questions that I had. Is there anything that you feel it would’ve been important to say that we didn’t say? If that’s the case, please feel free to use this platform now.

[00:37:09] June Jiu: The event is free, but we do ask that you register, so that we do have a good count of how many people are coming. So please sign up at 2025.wpaccessibility.day and you’ll find the registration link there.

[00:37:26] Nathan Wrigley: Is that a mere request or is that a requirement? In order to gain access, do you need to have, yeah, okay. So I’m getting a nod of the head there from June. So go and register in order to access the content as well. David, anything we missed?

[00:37:38] David Denedo: Yeah, the only thing is that I’m excited for Vitaly Friedman, because he has a very wide following, so he will bring more people into our event, hopefully. And he is going to be talking about accessible designs, which is something quite powerful. Because in this day and age, people always associate accessibility with very boring designs. But he’s coming to show you that you can have very beautiful designs in 2025 and still be accessible. So that’s a very important topic.

[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: Well, the WP Accessibility Day website is an example of that. It’s actually a really tasteful, beautiful design. I’m going to guess that it’s, you know, the accessibility credentials of it are fairly strong. Let’s just, make that assumption, but it’s beautifully designed.

Yeah, we didn’t really touch on the names of the speakers or what have you. But yeah, I’ll just go through a few just as I scroll through, just to give you some ideas.

So accessible design patterns is Vitaly. Being a colorblind designer, typography, readability, digital accessibility, building accessibility that works in the global south, hyper accessible web design for the blind, audio accessibility, accessibility lawsuits, gosh, we’re only like six or seven in, and we’ve run the full gamut already. So here we go. Why accessibility matters, video and media your post-production, guide making WordPress events accessible, gosh, that’s fascinating. Auditing WordPress plugin accessibility, demystifying screen readers, technical checklists. That means testing WordPress themes and plugins for accessibility. The future is automated, will it be accessible? Making Gutenberg blocks accessible. I’m going to stop there, but you get the idea. There’s absolutely loads of breadth and depth.

It’s very much the case that if you were to show up, I would guarantee more or less that there’s going to be something which will pique your interest and keep you engaged. The schedule, like I said, is at forward slash schedule.

Okay, if that’s the case, I will just say thank you so much for being one of many cogs in this very important wheel. Thank you for doing what is incredibly important work, making the web accessible to far more people. Thank you. That’s quite amazing.

So June and David, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

[00:39:46] June Jiu: Thanks for having us.

[00:39:48] David Denedo: Thanks for having us.

On the podcast today we have June Liu and David Denedo.

Both June and David are key members of the WP Accessibility Day organising team, a global, volunteer-driven event focused on improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. June serves as the marketing team co-lead and works with sponsors, bringing her background in project management to keep the event’s efforts on track. David, a web designer and content creator based in London, contributes to the marketing and post-event teams, with his interest in web accessibility stemming from his personal experience as a visually impaired user.

WP Accessibility Day has grown significantly in the past few years, uniting a large, international group of volunteers and organisers to drive awareness and practical change in web accessibility. The event is powered by a host of teams, marketing, sponsors, tech and vendor, post-event, translation, speakers, and more, ensuring that everything from live captioning to sign language interpretation is in place.

We begin by learning about June and David’s unique paths to accessibility advocacy, one through direct lived experience, and the other through supporting a loved one with cognitive challenges. Their stories highlight why accessibility can’t be an afterthought and how events like WP Accessibility Day are raising awareness in this important area.

We discuss what attendees can expect at this year’s event, happening from October 15th, 2025. It’s free, fully virtual, and runs for 24 hours, making space for a diverse range of speakers and topics. Whether you’re interested in the moral, legal, or technical cases for accessibility, there’s something for you here, including sessions on accessible design, risk management for agencies, legal compliance, and demonstrations of assistive technologies.

June and David share how the event format, a combination of pre-recorded talks and live chat, mixes polished content with real-time engagement, plus how translation and community involvement are key to its growing impact.

If you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you’re motivated by global collaboration and personal stories, this episode is for you.

Useful links

WP Accessibility Website

The WP Accessibility Day Team

The WP Accessibility Day Schedule

WP Accessibility Day YouTube Channel