While it is still Wednesday here in the U.S., some parts of the world are already awakening to the third Thursday in May, which is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of the event is to get more people discussing, learning, and addressing issues related to the inclusion of people with disabilities in the…
In what is seen as a win for accessibility advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Domino’s petition to appeal a lower-court decision on whether the pizza chain’s website and mobile app must be accessible to those with disabilities. The earlier U.S. 9th Circuit court ruled that websites fall under Title III of the American with…
Major accessibility improvements are the headline feature of this week’s Gutenberg plugin release. Version 6.3 introduces new Navigation and Editor modes to address long-standing problems navigating the block UI with a screen reader. The editor is now loaded in Navigation mode by default. Riad Benguella described it as “an important milestone in terms of accessibility…
WordPress’ accessibility team is evaluating the possibility of organizing a virtual Global Accessibility Day, similar to the Polyglots’ Global Translation Day. This marathon-style contributor event has proven to be valuable for the Polyglots in terms of recruiting, onboarding, and fueling progress on translation projects. Accessibility contributors proposed the idea at a meeting two weeks ago…
The WordPress Theme Review Team (TRT) met today and agreed to put new accessibility requirements in place for themes hosted in the official directory. These include some of the items that are required for theme authors who want to add the accessibility-ready tag. A handful of these requirements will soon be added to the standard…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Rachel Cherry, Freelance software engineer, consultant, and director of WPCampus and Brian DeConinck, a front-end designer and developer with the OIT Design and Web Services team, part of the Office of Information Technology at NC State University. We learn how Tenon was chosen as the vendor to perform the…
WPCampus has published the results of the Gutenberg accessibility audit the organization commissioned from Tenon, LLC. The audit was crowdfunded by the WordPress community and Matt Mullenweg and Automattic pledged to cover the balance to ensure it would be fully funded. Tenon’s analysis includes a 329-page technical audit of the editor along with user-based testing…
WordPress contributor teams have shipped several new tools for theme developers in the past couple weeks, which have the potential to raise the quality of new themes coming into the ecosystem. The Theme Sniffer plugin is a new effort from the Theme Review team that uses custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer to test a theme against…
WPCampus announced that Tenon LLC, a leading accessibility firm founded by Karl Groves, has been selected to perform its Gutenberg accessibility audit. More than $10,000 has come in through WPCamps’ crowdfunding campaign. Shortly before WordCamp US 2018, Automattic pledged to fund the remainder of the audit. The final cost for the chosen vendor is $31,200.…
WPCampus is seeking funding to conduct an accessibility audit of WordPress’ Gutenberg editor. The non-profit organization is dedicated to helping web professionals, educators, and others who work with WordPress in higher education. Educational institutions often have stricter legal obligations that require software to be WCAG 2.0 level AA compliant and many European institutions set the…
WordPress 5.0 will soon replace the editor with the new Gutenberg editor as part of a multi-phase project to improve the experience of authoring rich content. Phase 2 will shift focus to tackle site customization, bringing more complex layout and page builder capabilities to Gutenberg. As this phase kicks off soon, it’s valuable to see…
WordPress’ Accessibility team will be hosting a hackathon at Contributor Day on Sunday, December 9, at WordCamp US in Nashville. The team will be joined by lead developers from Deque Systems, a widely respected accessibility firm in the industry, with the goal of setting up automated accessibility testing for WordPress core. The event has been…
WordPress’ accessibility team has published a statement on the level of overall accessibility of Gutenberg. The team, largely a group of unpaid volunteers, collaborated on a detailed assessment that publicly challenges Gutenberg’s readiness for core in a way that no other WordPress team has done through official channels to date. After a week of testing…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Topher DeRosia, a developer evangelist for BigCommerce. DeRosia introduces what BigCommerce is, why users and developers should take a look at it, and why they’re making a big push into the WordPress space. He also provides an update on HeroPress and why next year, you’ll…
WPCampus is looking to hire a company to perform an accessibility audit of the Gutenberg editor. The organization is a community of more than 800 web professionals, educators, and others who work with WordPress in higher education. WPCampus director Rachel Cherry published a request for proposals detailing the organization’s specific concerns: Our organization is sensitive…