Thanks for your coverage of the W3C redesign project Sarah, it’s nice to see our progress being discussed more widely.

Due to a range of factors, we believe Craft offered a better solution to W3C for this project. It wasn’t just down to accessibility (but that became the most important factor).

Your article is pretty critical, though you do also provide some balanced viewpoints. On testing WordPress, we have years of experience building sites in WordPress and we started assessing Gutenberg even before its release to see how we could use it in the future. If anything we tested WordPress a lot more.

At the time of reviewing accessibility (in June) we reviewed the current backlog of issues reported by the community and had real-world users test the editor. This, our experience, and subsequent coverage by people like Joe Dolson, does indicate Gutenberg still has some way to go to be a reliable editing tool for users with accessibility needs.

I applaud the efforts in the community to improve this and am excited about the WordPress Accessibility Day which is later this week https://wpaccessibilityday.org/

I want to make clear our decision not to use WordPress on this project is not intended to be a negative comment on WordPress, which I believe is very valuable software and one we use on many client projects, such as recently for UK Parliament https://www.studio24.net/work/parliamentary-digital-service/

It’s also important to note we are only one type of user of WordPress (a digital agency who builds custom themes and websites for clients). Gutenberg will be the right tool for other users in other contexts. We plan to carry on testing Gutenberg in the future to see if we can find ways to better use it for our work.

I do think this has highlighted the importance of accessibility in CMS authoring tools, which I hope helps improve the CMS industry for many – not just WordPress. Craft’s investment in accessibility is a great step forward and one that I hope other CMS businesses invest in publicly https://craftcms.com/blog/accessibility

If anyone wants to keep up to date with the rest of the project please do visit https://w3c.studio24.net/