In this episode, Amber and Steve give a full recap of our first-ever Global Accessibility Awareness Day pledge drive, where dozens of people spent hundreds of hours advancing accessibility in their own organizations, and beyond.
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Mentioned in this Episode
- Mom Water “Karen” Flavor
- Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2025 Pledges
- Include Mastodon Feed by Wolfgang
- DD Live 30: Making the world more ACCESSIBLE for everyone! (GAAD 2025)
- Celebrating GAAD with IMG A11Y v1.1.0
Transcript
Chris: Welcome to the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company, and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin. And now, onto the show.
Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Steve.
Steve: Hello everyone.
Amber: And no Chris.
Steve: No Chris.
Amber: He bailed on us.
Steve: Yeah, he’s working. He’s a good boy.
Amber: Yeah. We, on the other hand, are going to enjoy our post GAAD beverages and talk to you today about the measuring the impact of contributions to WordPress in the community.
So welcome. This is episode, I’ve got a number somewhere, 118. And if you wanna find show notes, you can find that if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/118. And of course, we always start with a beverage. We’re gonna have to go on the fly for this ’cause normally Chris introduces them. So I’ll say the name and we can talk a little bit about what we discovered on their website.
Yeah. Steve, do you think that’s a good idea?
Steve: Yeah.
Today’s Beverage
Amber: All right. So we are drinking Mom Water, and the name of the flavor is Karen flavor. So I’ll tell you, Chris found this at the grocery store and he brought it home and he showed it to me and I’m like, I feel like we need to have a topic where we just complain about things.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: So I don’t know if this beverage matches our discussion today. What? I don’t know. What do you think?
Steve: Yeah, I, I don’t know, I don’t think we’re gonna go into Karen territory here, but a funny thing with the names they also have Dad Water. They got one called Steve. So Steve Dad Water.
Amber: So I thought that was hilarious because the Dad Waters have descriptions for what they associate with that flavor or name. And the Steve one is the jock. So I don’t know. You weren’t a jock were you? And it, but I thought it was funny ’cause it says it’s grapefruit flavored tequila water. It says bittersweet, like your last home game.
Steve: Yeah. It says, it says if you’re not first, you’re last a little throwback to Talladega Nights. Ricky Bobby.
Amber: Yeah. I will say, so the I kind of wish we did have Dad Water because grapefruit tequila sounds pretty good. Now this is we have mom water and all the mom waters are vodka.
Steve: Yep.
Amber: Yeah, and I looked up, we’ll put a link to their about page. They have a whole video on there that tells the story.
This is like a homegrown family brand, and apparently the woman would go on like vacation. And she got tired of drinking these really sweet cocktails. I just drank beer instead. But she’s it was too much sugar. I couldn’t handle it. And so one day she had they had flavored water sitting on the bar, like infused water.
And she asked the bartender, hey, can you just put like some vodka in this? And it wasn’t carbonated or anything and she really liked it. And so that was the history of how they came up with this. And it became named Mom Water because she started making itself for it at home. Home, but she would just put it in water bottles in their cooler, and then one time their kid accidentally drank some because it wasn’t any different from any of the other water bottles.
So then she started writing mom on hers so that, it was the Mom Water. So that the kids wouldn’t drink the, yeah. Yeah. She’s my kid drank it and was like, this stuff tastes gross. What is it?
Steve: It says ingredient water, vodka, natural lemon, blueberry flavors and citric acid. So I don’t know if that, it says natural lemon, blueberry flavors, but I don’t know exactly what that means. But…
Amber: Yeah, it does not mean lemon juice or blueberry juice. I’m guessing because if it was juice, they’d have to say that. And there’s no like percent juice on this, so…
Steve: But it looks like, I don’t know, what would you call the art style of this? It’s like a tanish can with I don’t know, some kind of yellow?
Amber: You know what this reminds me of? We had, back in our marketing agency days, we had a frozen vegetable company. They don’t exist anymore. Covid killed them. But they, this was the kind of style that we used to do with their packaging and all of their stuff where it would have a very plain, basic background.
But then sort of realistic. Water. Colors of vegetables.
Steve: Yeah, that’s exactly what it looks like. Made a lot of sound. So there’s pressure in there.
Amber: So pressure. But there’s no like fizzing, right?
Steve: No.
Amber: I can’t even get my open.
Steve: Oh man, that was a good one.
Amber: It doesn’t smell too bad. I was afraid it was gonna taste like or smell super vodka-y.
Steve: It’s not strong on the nose at all. I mean, I don’t taste vodka. Maybe just slightly. Do you taste vodka?
Amber: I kind of taste, I taste vodka a little bit on the end, but it’s not like super strong. It does, it’s not like having a shot or something, so, which is good.
Steve: But it’s water. It’s water. It’s not like the, like it’s, you definitely notice no carbon carbonation.
Amber: Yeah. In comparison to some of the other like ranch waters or other things that we’ve had on here where it’s like a sparkling water that is spiked. This is it’s flat, but doesn’t bother me. Does it bother you that it’s flat? Do you miss the carbonation?
Steve: I mean, I like carbonation, but if I’m sitting on a beach or something like this, would, I’d feel like I was hydrating myself and getting a little tipsy at the same time.
Amber: Would it be hydrating? It’s like hydrating and dehydrating at the same time.
Steve: It would feel like you’re hydrating yourself.
Amber: It’s kind of interesting.
Steve: It’s it’s good. I mean, it’s like confused water, right? It’s not strong, but like it has some sweetness to it. I mean, there are some calories in here, so there must be some sugar. No, well, no carbs.
Amber: It says zero sugar. Zero sugar, zero carbohydrates. Zero artificial flavors. Zero artificial sweeteners.
Steve: That’s weird. ’cause it tastes kind of sweet.
Amber: I mean, maybe that’s just like the blueberry flavor is tricking you a little bit.
You know, it’s that way. Sometimes when I put cinnamon in things, like I don’t ever sweeten my tea. I drink hot tea all day long, but sometimes I’ll have a chai or something with a cinnamon in it, or there’s this one like spicy cinnamon tea that Chris gets.
But it like tastes really sweet and it has no sugar in it, and I think like the cinnamon. So I feel like there’s certain flavors that when they hit your tongue is like, this is sweet, even though it’s not. Yeah.
Steve: Well this has 4.5% alcohol, so you could get, you could drink about 10 of these pretty easy because it doesn’t taste like it, it doesn’t taste like there’s any alcohol in this, to me.
GAAD Recap
Amber: Well, after the long week of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which we’re gonna call GAAD a whole bunch on this podcast I definitely could probably drink more than one of these.
And guess what, Chris isn’t here, so there’s a bonus one. I’m gonna say, I actually give this a thumbs up. I did not expect to, I expected not to like it, but I like it. I’m curious about other flavors. I’m super curious about the Steve Dad Water. I might have to go get some of that and report back on Twitter about it.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: So do you give a thumbs up, up?
Steve: I think it’s good. I like it.
Amber: All right. Well, we are going to be talking today about measuring the impact of contributions to WordPress Accessibility. Today we’re gonna be recapping GAAD, which was last Thursday for everyone. As you are listening, the week that this comes out, we did for the first time a pledge where we asked people leading up to GAAD to commit time to working on accessibility. We had them, say what they were going to work on. You can go to the pledge page, which we’ll link in our show notes and see people. There were 86 people who ended up pledging 382 hours to working on accessibility in that one day, which I thought was really cool for the first time of us ever doing that.
Steve: Yeah. It was awesome. So…
Amber: So I, I thought maybe we could talk about kind of what we did and then maybe we can talk about what other people did. What, so you were doing some tweeting?
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: What did you work on, Steve?
Steve: So I kind of, made a big promise to create a plugin in a day that would help with accessibility. And so we decided to create a plugin to pause animated GIFs because it…
We meaning, sorry, we meaning me, Steve, and one of our senior plugin developers, William. We kind of, we got on a Zoom call all day long and we pair programmed together and we put together, this plugin. So we, I had committed eight hours. I don’t know what William, did he? He probably did eight. He worked eight hours. So I don’t know what he committed, but it was definitely…
Amber: He also, I think I saw him in make WordPress Slack having some conversations about some stuff related to theme accessibility testing and that kind of stuff. So I think he did some contributions to community projects as well.
Steve: Yeah. He was trying to, yeah, he was trying to get in, get some information on some things there. So we had an old plugin that did this. So the reason why this is kind of important and why I think it makes a lot of impact from an accessibility standpoint is because it meets WCAG 2.2.2 L evel A.
And I think most people don’t realize that animated things on your website such as GIFs at a level a have to be plausible and you have to be able to stop the animation. And, and that’s something that’s overlooked quite a bit. And pausing GIFs animations or WebP images as well or animated WebP images is quite difficult and cumbersome. And we had recently done a big refactor on a lot of stuff in our Accessibility Checker plugin. And we were detecting animated GIFsin PHP, which is server- side code. And we were switching doing that with JavaScript code. And we really ran into a lot of technical problems with doing it with JavaScript, which is normally the other way around. Normally it’s a lot easier to do things on, on, on the client side once the page is loaded with JavaScript to manipulate it.
But in this instance, it actually ended up being very hard because of, you know, images being, we needed pre-cash images and things like that, which kind of led to this. We did, we found a package that actually helped us facilitate pausing the images, but actually the package would apply this pause functionality to anything with a dot GIF on it.
So, and…
Amber: Is that, well, what else would have a dot GIFs?
Steve: A static GIF.
Amber: Oh. Oh. And you don’t really, and it seems silly to put a pause and play button on something.
Steve: Where like when you’re contributing like this and you’re kind of giving back to accessibility and stuff, it can kind of trickle down too. ‘Cause we went on the package repo for that and we requested a change and the guy made the change yesterday, like.
Amber: Oh, that’s cool.
Steve: So, so you can kind of force people into contributing on GAAD as well, but, so …
Amber: That’s awesome that he responded that quickly. I feel like we should, you should, give us a link in the show notes for that repo, and we should share it because that’s awesome that you opened an issue and he just responded right away. Not everybody does that.
Steve: Yeah, totally. And it, and the package is actually an it’s called A11y GIFs I think. So it’s actually accessibility related.
So, kind of merging that into our own plugin and making our own changes in some of our own detection. We were able to, we were able to put together a plugin in one day. Now granted it was a long day and there was a few times where we both kind of said, Why did we promise to do this in one day?
But so, so it’s pretty full featured. You can add pause buttons to your GIFs and you can add exclusions by class names, by selector names. And you can have, if one GIF is paused, all the GIFs on the page are paused. You can, or you can have it work individually. If reduced motion is enabled on your system, it will automatically pause the GIFs on the website, so it’s pretty full featured.
We’re probably iron out a few things before we submit it to the WordPress plugin repository or potentially roll it into one of into the Accessibility Checker. But that’s what we did. It was a lot of work, but it was exciting and it was a neat challenge to force yourself to see something through to completion. ‘Cause there was definitely a couple times where we wanted to tap, tap out.
Amber: Yeah, I definitely felt that. Yeah, I felt that a little bit.
Steve: So what’d you work on?
Amber: So. Yeah, I worked on the Accessibility Ready Guideline updates, which I am going to fully acknowledge, I had a goal last year of finishing this. Rian Reitveldt felt had started them in June at contributor day at WordCamp Europe. I asked her, she’s what can I do? And I was like, would you review these old guidelines? Because I think they had last been updated in like 2014. They were originally written in 2012. Obviously there are a lot of changes to WCAG since then and just best practices in general.
So she started it and then I did more work on it with some people at WordCamp Canada. Yeah, and then I just got so busy with WordPress Accessibility Day and a bunch of other things and WordCamp US that I didn’t follow back up on it. And it, you know, it’s one of those things where you’re like, I want to contribute to the WordPress project, but it it never pays. It, it’s like giving back and there’s positive payment, but there’s not literal payment in it. And so you have to weigh your contributions to, you know, making money and feeding your family and and your other time and all of that kind of stuff. And so it was one of those things where I kept being like, I wanna do this, I wanna do this.
But I never found the time, like we moved, I don’t know, there was just so much going on. As I was thinking about what can I do that would be a big impact for the community as a whole and the project, I was like, I should follow up on this thing I promised to do last year. So, Joe Dolson and I teamed up on that.
And we have been working on a Google Doc, which is, I wanna say 75% done. I’m gonna finish it today and then we’re gonna submit it for community feedback for there to be new guidelines in order to get the Accessibility Ready tag. And we have a whole new process outlined. One of the changes that I’ll tease now and then maybe we can save the rest of it for after it launches. We could have a whole podcast episode about it. But one of the changes that we’re gonna do is if an existing theme that’s already live wants to have the tag currently, they would add the tag and then it would trigger a review. While the problem with that, of course, is that’s misleading for someone who’s searching for themes because really only themes that have been reviewed and actually are accessible should have that tag.
So we’ve removed that as the process, and Joe built a form on WordPress.org in the accessibility section where you could go request a review. And then that way we’re making sure that only themes that are actually approved have the tag.
So, that I think will help with more transparency and ensuring that the themes that have that tag are actually accessible and not misleading people that are searching on WordPress.org and we’re adding a couple of new requirements as well, and just making the whole testing process a lot more clear with the idea that it’s easier for people to test and contribute.
So, so that’s the thing that I worked on for about eight hours yesterday. In addition to doing some stuff for WP Accessibility Day, we did a live stream in the middle of the day and we had a normal planning meeting that was on this calendar, and we’re like, of course we’re still gonna do that. So I, I did all of that kind of stuff yesterday and I’m wrapping some of it up today as well.
Steve: Awesome. So what about the other 80 some people?
Amber: Yeah. So we, I did have a required field when people pledged where they could check off things they were working on, and I think this is sort of interesting data. Now you have to remember that this isn’t the, this is like things people said, but it’s not like people could only pick one. You could choose multiple.
The vast majority of people had checked the box about 30% of them for something else. And if you read through, like a lot of them were working on their own website or doing stuff for clients, like training maybe, or I saw a couple people said they were gonna do an audit of like their starter theme or something like that, like their internal stuff.
But we did have 10% of people say they were gonna work on WordPress core, 8% on Gutenberg, 16% said doing something for a WordPress plugin, 6% WordPress themes. That might’ve been like me and Joe, maybe William, I think he checked that off. But you know, a few people that, and then 17% accessibility education and 11% said they were gonna do something for WordPress Accessibility Day.
So, so that’s kind of the big breakdown. I know we got some feedback from people and hopefully more people will continue to send that in, ’cause I, I do wanna put together a recap impact blog post.
But some of the things I saw one thing I was excited about was Aaron Jorbin, who is a core committer for WordPress. He ran a accessibility focused bug scrub in the core channel. Normally, accessibility bug scrubs only happen in the accessibility channel and they’re run by people on the accessibility team.
He wasn’t previously in the accessibility team or channel even, so it’s really exciting to see someone who doesn’t normally get involved with the accessibility tickets per se, to say, okay, because of this, I’m gonna step up. I’m gonna do something related to accessibility. And he ran that scrub in the core channel because he said he wanted it to get more attention from other people that don’t normally work on accessibility, which that was one of my goals.
Also shout out RT Camp. They are one of the biggest contributors. If you look at the most recent WordPress release, they were the company that contributed the most to that. As far as commits, they had, I think 13 people on their team who don’t normally work on accessibility things say that on this day I’m gonna work on accessibility bug fixes or patches in either WordPress court or Gutenberg, or doing other things related to accessibility documentation.
So I thought that was really cool to see people who don’t normally do that, but are active in WordPress taking that step.
Steve: Yeah. So, and how did that scrub go? Were you there? Were you there for it?
Amber: I kind of, I watched it a little bit, but I didn’t super participate in it. I don’t I probably could have pulled some stats on how many things were closed or how many people were able to move something forward, but unfortunately I didn’t think to do that before we were recording this. So I’ll have to find that for the blog post, I was trying to do my own stuff and not be too, it’s so easy to just watch Slack and talk in Slack and not actually do anything.
Steve: So I did a search on the GAAD 2025 page on our website, and there were thir 13 RT Camp people. So that’s pretty huge.
Amber: Yeah, well I think their CEO shared the pledge with their team and was like, Hey you guys could do this. So, you know, that’s the thing. Thinking about if you run a company and you wanna give back to WordPress. Encouraging your team, even if it’s only for a day, that is something you can do.
And as a head like that makes it okay for them to say. Okay, I am gonna, you know, not do my normal day today. Now of course, some of them at RT camp, their normal day today might just be contributing to WordPress because they’re a company I think who might pay full-time contributors. But that said, like saying, Hey, focus on accessibility today.
If you’re a business leader, you have the ability to really shape that and make people pay more attention to accessibility because you are encouraging it and giving them permission to do that.
Steve: And you’re still paying them, you know, so it’s there’s a, I mean, we did the same thing, right? Our whole team all contributed and so there’s a monetary component to it.
Amber: We didn’t do client work yesterday at all. Like we had you know, our Content Specialist, Paula, for example, she normally would do a lot for clients, but yesterday she was doing translations for WP Accessibility Day and translating videos into Spanish.
‘Cause that was a thing that she said that she wanted to do. She thought it would be interesting to make that accessibility education available to people who only speak Spanish. So, you know, it’s really cool and obviously yes. Does that mean she wasn’t doing any billable work?
Steve: Yep.
Amber: Correct. But for a day like it, it made sense for us to allow her to invest her time in that way.
Steve: Cool. So we’ve got a few on the more on the list. We had Bjarne Oldrup, right? He did some a eleven fixes on the Include Mastodon Feed plugin.
Amber: Yeah, I thought this was neat. Like just being able to think about how can I contribute to WordPress? If you don’t necessarily wanna contribute to WordPress core, but contributing to WordPress plugins is contributing to WordPress. And I think he said this plugin is used by 800 different websites.
Steve: Yeah. And he tested it with NVDA, made recommendations, some improvements to PHP and JavaScript code.
Amber: So I thought this was neat. He did, he’s not affiliated with that plugin, but I guess maybe he uses it on his website or on his client sites or something. So he reached out to that person and said, Hey, I wanna report issues. Would you be willing to fix them? And so the two of them teamed up. And he also said, I thought this was great and I met a new friend.
Steve: Yeah. I mean that’s…
Amber: Which is one of the things we love about the WordPress community.
Steve: Yeah, totally cool.
Amber: Yeah. So Adam Wright, he he had posted about this on his Facebook page that he only had an hour of time to pledge, but still an hour can do something.
He used our Accessibility Checker plugin and WAVE, and he did some fixes on his own website. So he updated and added some alt texts, removed title attributes, disabled opening links in new tabs, fixed a redundant link, and he checked the site on 200% Zoom. So I thought that was a really great example of how even, you know, a small amount of time, you can get a lot done sometimes.
Steve: And Mark Armstrong he attended a two hour webinar, provided training resources to his team, and did accessibility review of three new project features. Spent almost the whole day doing accessibility. So the neat thing about training, like spending that time like is getting training, is that giving back? But if it actually instills you with knowledge about accessibility you didn’t have before, it actually is like a net positive contribution moving forward because you’re now more informed in every project you work on.
Amber: Yeah, I think Gen Harris sent me an email that she did sort of the same thing.
She did some training for with clients and training for, or answered some questions for a plugin developer. I’m not sure which plugin, but that really, I think like you’re saying, it has this ripple effect. So you might think accessibility training my clients isn’t contributing, but actually I think it is contributing to building a more accessible web.
Because if you teach them how to add their content better, then every time they go write a blog post, which you know might be once a week, might be five times a week for some clients, they’re going to be creating better, more accessible content, which overall over time is going to positively impact people with disabilities.
Steve: So David Deneato, Denetto?
He manually updated the captions for five of his most recent YouTube videos. He organized a live accessibility discussion on YouTube to talk generally about accessibility, and he started updating the captions for the live, his live streams. But it is still in progress. So that’s a lot of cool video related contributions.
Amber: And then Robert Devore also told us what he was doing. He updated his Image Accessibility Plugin. I’m not familiar with this one. Are you familiar?
Steve: Well, I am now since, since he tweeted about it last night. But yeah, I need to download it and play around with it, but it looks pretty cool.
Amber: Yeah, so I think he said he removed some accessibility options for non image media and he added better support for Elementor, which is great because think of how many websites use Elementor. So if you’re doing something that helps make Elementor websites better, then you could have a really big impact.
Steve: Yeah, totally.
Amber: It is interesting. We’ve kind of been talking about the impact of all of this work, you know, as we go and different types of it. But there’s always, there’s been some discussions about just contributing and measuring contributions. And this was something that I wanted to talk about here, and I’m curious, what is your overall thought on the impact of that work in one day and is this worth it? Should we do this GAAD pledge thing again next year?
Steve: Sure. So the, I mean, so there’s a tangible way to measure the impact of this, and there’s an intangible way to measure the impact of this. And of course the tangible is what did you produce, right? Created a plugin. You updated these features in your plugin. You revise the guidelines. You remove the ability to add an accessibility flag to a theme that’s not accessible or hasn’t been reviewed for accessibility. Those are very tangible ways to measure the impact. And I think those are pretty huge impacts.
And these are, a lot of these things are cumulative, like plugins are installed on multiple websites. Themes are installed on multiple websites. So the net gain of it really can just be a domino effect for as long as the software is active. And I also think there’s an intangible too, and I think a lot of that centers around awareness, right?
What you’re doing on GAAD is you’re not just producing fixes . You’re building awareness that accessibility matters and it adds importance to accessibility. And then when people contribute, the knowledge that they gain through the process of contributing, they carry along with them.
So I think the impact is pretty huge. I mean, we had 86 people. How many hours was it? Let me look. 382 hours of contributions there, but really I think the cumulative hours and the cumulative impact moving forward is huge because it just built a lot of awareness. I think us running this and Amber having the forethought to put this together, gained a lot of attention through the community and it just helps spread accessibility that much further.
Amber: Yeah, so I wanna talk more about the community, but let’s take a quick commercial break and then we can come back and talk about the WordPress community and what’s going on there right now.
Brought to you by Accessibility Checker
Steve: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find accessibility problems before you hit publish. Thousands of businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies around the world trust Accessibility Checker to help their teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility problems on an ongoing basis.
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Thoughts on a Slower WordPress Core Release Schedule
Amber: All right, so Steve, have your inhibitions been sufficiently lowered by your Mom Water enough that you’re willing to share, candid thoughts about WordPress?
Steve: Yeah. No, my admissions are still intact, but I’m still willing to share.
Amber: Alright, so, let’s talk about this no more major releases this year.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: What do we know about bug fixes being released? Will contributions to core getting worked on? Do we think this is a problem or not? What do you think?
Steve: Well, I mean, I think there’s multiple ways to look at it. At first, at my first knee jerk response to it was like, oh, that’s not good. But then I thought…
Amber: It’s so funny because your knee jerk response was the opposite of mine. I was like. Yeah, sounds great.
Steve: Yeah, exactly. And then so I said that…
Amber: So tell me why was that your jerk response?
Steve: Well, there’s, again, I think there’s two, two things here, right? There’s the actual pushing the software forward, right? And then there’s the appearance of whether the software is active in moving forward. Whether that WordPress is seen as a thriving and active piece of open source software.
Or is it stagnating? I think that’s really where WordPress is kind of dabbling with a plateau, right? It hit its peak and kind of dipped a little, kind of came back up, right? So, does this make WordPress look a certain way?
Amber: It used to just be one release a year.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: I remember when it was one release a year.
Steve: Yeah, but things are moving, as far as technology, AI, the internet, it feels like things are so accelerated these days. It’s like there’s this new huge feature in this AI that’s gonna change the world every three days. You know, it’s it’s some of that sensationalized, right?
But I think the other end where, you know, my initial knee jerk was like, oh, that’s not good. And then you were like, well, you know, if what’s being released is not like the best stuff, then maybe not releasing features that really don’t move the needle is not necessarily a bad thing. Now that’s all debatable.
I’m not saying that the features that are being released don’t actually move the needle. I’m just saying that, you know, there’s a little bit of fatigue with the block editor taking so long to kind of come to maturity, you know, and it’s does the block editor stagnate now that new features won’t be released?
Amber: I mean, probably right? There’s some stuff in it that they’ve released that was intentionally released as a, we’re not quite there yet. But now they’re PAing they’re probably not going to finish those features?
Steve: So, so that’s the question we ask ourselves. Is that good or is that bad? And that probably depends on your take or your opinion of the block editor. I think regardless of that opinion the block editor is there. A lot of our clients are using it, so if it stagnates or you don’t get you know, it takes 10 years to get responsive controls, you know, like inside the block editor. It’s like that may be problematic and that may open the door for somebody else to come in and kind of squeeze their way in there with their own block or with their own page builder that actually does fit all the needs that everybody has.
Amber: Well, I mean, I will say, I literally saw action on a ticket today that I opened over the Summer for Gutenberg being like, I want the button block that only creates links, not buttons, to be capable of creating a button. Because people abuse the button block. And in accessibility audits, this is something we see all the time and there is discussion on it, and then nothing.
And then today somebody’s I have a PR, which sort of addresses some of the things, but even that, someone was like, well, hold on, more discussion.
Three weeks ago I had a conversation about this with Ben Ritner who develops Kadence and Kadence blocks and I was like, this is a problem. And he’s oh, I see what you mean. So then he modified and released a fix for his Kadence button block.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: That solves that. Like it’s even, it’s interesting because it’s even dynamic. He figured out a way to be like, if he can tell that they’re like doing something with JavaScript, he automatically is turning it into a button. And it is like just the speed at which it can move, right?
Steve: Yep.
Amber: When you don’t have the giant committee that is WordPress community. And so it is interesting ’cause now I’m like, well boy, that’s a big argument for me to go use that button, the Kadence button instead of a core button because the core button can’t do that.
Steve: You know, it creates more fragmentation between different block libraries and we’ve had issues, you know, with using core and using third party libraries and third party libraries update. And part of that’s to do with, you know, the speed at which Gutenberg was released and the major changes that have happened. Maybe this will bring some stability, you know, maybe that block can be extended in some way.
Amber: So that was my initial reaction.
When I heard it. I was like, maybe slower is better because I think there’s been this race to try and catch up. And let’s be frank to catch up with some of the page builders making visual site editing possible. Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divvy, right? Like a lot of these are way more user friendly for non-technical people. And I think that Automattic and WordPress, at that level realized that WordPress core was behind these visual page builders that already existed in WordPress. They were behind the SaaS’s that WordPress competes with. Shopify or Squarespace or Wix, right?
And said, okay, we need to do it. We need to catch up and we need to try and build all these things. And but what was happening is that race to get things out was causing accessibility to frequently be overlooked because the accessibility team is small.
Not a lot of people know how to test for accessibility. They’re building it with React, which out of the box is not going to produce accessible code. You have to force it to. And so to me, when I hear slow down on new features, I think, hey, great, this might give us time to catch up on all those open accessibility issues. And maybe we could do some accessibility bug fixes.
And I did ask Joe this yesterday in our live stream and his reaction was kind of the same as mine, so it made me feel a little better. ‘Cause he’s actually a core committer. But, but he was saying he thinks most accessibility fixes, like the vast majority of them would not require a new file. And so he thinks that this won’t slow down accessibility work at all because they’ll just be working in the same files.
Steve: Well, I mean, what kind of a might throw a little wrench into that is that there definitely is a pullback on the number of contributors, right? ‘Cause a lot of those contributors were sponsored by Automattic.
Amber: But Automattic isn’t the only one who pulled back. We don’t wanna just point out them
Steve: Who?
Amber: I noticed that Blue Host did.
Steve: Oh.
Amber: And on the, and I’m 99% sure that Andrea, who is a Yoast employee, but he was a full-time sponsored contributor who was on the accessibility team. He is no longer allowed to contribute ’cause New Fold that owns Blue Host that owns Yoast, pulled back their contribution hours too.
Steve: Oh. So, yeah so there’s been a little bit of a pullback and I think that’s a little bit of the negative effect of what’s been going on with WordPress.
I think the interesting thing about WordPress too is that WordPress is an open source piece of software, right? You don’t have to ask permission to do things with WordPress.
Now, you kind of gotta get past a little threshold to get stuff into core, right? But you really don’t have to ask for any permission to make a theme or a plugin unless you want it in the WordPress.org repository, right? You can create a plugin. You can create a theme and put it on GitHub and, or put it on your website and sell it yourself with without asking any permission.
I think that’s the beautiful thing about open source software, right? Like you can just get in there and do, you can just do things right, like you don’t have to ask. And, and so WordPress can still move and WordPress can still do things. There’s been some talk about canonical plugins and things like that to help achieve things, but even that creates you know, a little bit of technical hurdles as well.
So I think WordPress, the community itself, can keep it going and it can survive. There is a still a little bit of gatekeeping to get certain things into, you know, especially in the Core. But I think this will be okay. It feels weird that there’s only one major release a year, but I’d like to see what these minor releases look like.
Amber: For a lot of people contributing to WordPress right now does feel pretty charged. And I’ve seen some people say, I’m not going to do it. I did think about that, this virtual contributor today, and I was like, do I only wanna say pledge if you’re willing to contribute to WordPress core or Gutenberg, or like docs or themes or something related to the actual WordPress open source project.
But I ended up deciding, no, I do think that it’s okay if people just wanna work on their own WordPress plugin or their own product or their own website, because that is still contributing to accessibility.
And particularly if you’re working on, accessibility issues in your plugin. So Remy from Elementor said, I’m gonna work on accessibility issues in Elementor the whole day. And maybe Remy doesn’t always do accessibility, like sometimes he’s doing other new features or whatever. That still helps accessibility in WordPress as a whole.
Because of all those users and everything. So I do think that matters. But the one thing I’ll say for people that are not sure about contributing to WordPress is, the way I have thought about it is whether, or not, you like some of the legal issues that are happening right now, does not take away from the impact that you can still have for users on the web.
The reality is WordPress powers 43% of the internet, and if you make something more accessible in WordPress, you are fixing 43% of the internet or some percentage of it.
And that is huge. Like, where else can you go have that impact? Like there’s Drupal in Joomla but they don’t cover anywhere near the percent that WordPress does.
And that, that’s not to say that Drup Drupal especially, has been doing amazing things for accessibility. And it’s a great open source project to be involved in or to learn about and that kind of stuff. But I would always say you really can make a huge difference for users. And that’s why I have continued to say I wanna do things to help the WordPress project because helping that WordPress project is one of the biggest ways that I can make the web better.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, install count can be juxtaposed against, visitor count as well to measure, to measure reach, right? Really go work on a Google or Facebook, then it’s probably a lot of impact.
Amber: Yeah, that’s true. If you were gonna go make, I don’t know, google.com more accessible or something. Yeah. You could probably have a better impact. Maybe make more money on your salary. I don’t know.
Steve: Yeah, I totally agree. I. Pushing things forward and you know, I know I’ve run into people that are a little shy of doing things with and with WordPress and contributing directly to it, but you don’t have to do it directly. You can do it. You can do a lot just on your own. You can just do things. And that’s the beautiful thing about WordPress.
Amber: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. So I think we’re at a good point where we can wrap up. I definitely wanna say, you know, thank you to everyone who did do work on Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
It really matters. However you contributed, however it made sense to you. I think that really. Help the web. And thank you. I hope my biggest takeaway that I hope people had from any experiences, especially if you’re someone who didn’t work on accessibility before or doesn’t work on it a lot, is that small adjustments can make a difference.
And I’m hoping that, maybe through the experience of contributing to accessibility on GAAD, that you will think about ways that you could contribute to accessibility more regularly in your process. What about you, Steve? What do you hope people take away from GAAD?
Steve: Well, I think it just inspires people to do it more often, and it just kind of puts the nugget in their head that, hey, this is something that matters and this is something that people, you know, this is so 86 people given, 382 hours to. That’s a lot of people.
I really liked, you know, where was it Oldrup made a friend. You know, and it’s so, so what that means is he’s building community, right? And so, I hope that people are inspired to continue contributing to accessibility in everything they do. And I hope that they continue to build community around accessibility and we can all join together and help each other make the web more accessible.
Amber: Perfect note to end on.
Steve: Yep.
Amber: And enjoy your Mom Water. Be a demanding Karen, demanding accessibility, and we’ll see you back here in two weeks for another conversation.
Steve: Alright, see you guys.
Chris: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your podcast app to get notified when future episodes release. You can find Accessibility Craft on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. And if building accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating accessibility Craft five stars on Apple Podcasts.
Accessibility Craft is produced by Equalize Digital and hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds and Steve Jones. Steve Jones composed our theme music. Learn How We Help Make thousands of WordPress websites more accessible at EqualizeDigital.com.