WordPress Accessibility Day 2026 is coming October 7–8, and this episode takes you behind the scenes of how its speakers, sessions, and keynote came together.
Ryan Bracey, Director of Web Development and User Experience at Second Melody and Speaker Team Lead for WordPress Accessibility Day, joins Amber and Chris to talk about the hidden work that goes into reviewing 88 speaker submissions, anonymizing proposals to reduce bias, building a diverse schedule, and balancing technical, business, design, and lived-experience perspectives.
Ryan also previews some of the sessions he is most excited about, including this year’s keynote from GitHub Head of Accessibility Ed Summers. And everyone previews what excites them personally, with a wide range of upcoming talks covering AI, accessible development workflows, WooCommerce onboarding, remediation pushback, and accessibility ownership after launch.
For the craft portion of Accessibility Craft, the group gets into the fall spirit with a Vienna-style lager from Austin’s Fast Friends Beer Company. The beer earns a rare unanimous two-thumbs-up and sparks a surprisingly nostalgic conversation about Oktoberfest, bonfires, beach cookouts, and questionable college beer choices.
Episode Outline
- Meet Ryan Bracey, WordPress Accessibility Day Speaker Team Lead
- How the WordPress Accessibility Day speaker team works
- The exhaustive process of reviewing and anonymizing 88 speaker submissions
- Building a diverse lineup of speakers, topics, skill levels, and perspectives
- Why strong talks can still get cut from a competitive conference schedule
- The session that received the first perfect review score in WPAD history: “Accessibility Is Not Enough: What We Learned Building the Website for The Dot Experience”
- Keynote preview: Ed Summers, Head of Accessibility at GitHub + other great talks the hosts and guest are looking forward to attending
- Why volunteering for WordPress Accessibility Day can create valuable professional (and personal) connections
- Tasting Fast Friends Beer Company’s Vienna-style lager, and an onslaught of Oktoberfest memories, bonfires, and the emotional side of tasting good beer
WordPress Accessibility Day is a free, 24-hour global accessibility conference taking place October 7–8, 2026. RSVP! Don’t miss it!
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Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible through their work.
Links & Resources
- WordPress Accessibility Day 2026
- Second Melody
- Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker
- Make WordPress Accessible Shop
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Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible through their work.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Introduction
Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.
Grab a drink, the show starts now!
Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber, and I’m here today with Chris
Chris: Hey everybody.
Amber: And today we have our friend Ryan Bracey joining us. Welcome, Ryan.
Ryan: Thank you, hello.
Amber: I’m gonna give you a chance to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your background in just a minute. But for folks who are tuning in that want show notes and a full transcript, this is episode number 182, so you can find that if you go to accessibilitycraft.com/182.
The other thing that we are trying a little bit harder now, to be a little bit more real podcast-esque or more YouTuber-esque is please, wherever you are watching or listening, hit that like button, the subscribe button, leave us a comment, or write us a review. If you are willing, it helps to get our show in front of a lot more people, which helps to spread the word about accessibility and the great event that we’re gonna be talking about today, WordPress Accessibility Day.
[00:01:40] Meet Ryan Bracey
Amber: Ryan, I would love for everyone to know your background, if you wanna share a little bit about your day-to-day job role and your role at WordPress Accessibility Day.
Ryan: Of course. So hello, everyone. My name’s Ryan Bracey, as Amber said. I am the Director of Web Development and User Experience at an agency called Second Melody. I’m located in New Jersey.
So day-to-day, I am running a department that does everything from strategizing websites, designing websites, and building websites, and launching them out into the world. We have everything in-house, so we work in tandem with copywriters, brand designers, to kind of bring all of this strategy and design work together and execute into a website. Which my role as a web designer got me very interested in web accessibility years ago, which brought me to WordPress Accessibility Meetup run by you guys. Which then brought me into WordPress Accessibility Day, where I volunteered a few years ago and then joined as an organizer the year after that. And the year after that became the speaker team lead, which I’ve now been doing for, I believe, four years or three years, somewhere around there.
Amber: Three years. I think you’ve been the speakers team lead, yeah.
Chris: You are deep down the rabbit hole, aren’t you?
Ryan: Yes.
Amber: And he is vital and does so many awesome things that we will never let him leave.
Ryan: Thank you for saying that, because I suffer from imposter syndrome, so I always think I’m not doing anything. But so a- the speakers team lead, I do have the unique pleasure of getting to really interact with our speakers a lot leading up to and during and even after the conference.
So starting around April when we open our call, I start receiving those submissions. Me and my team and then other people at Accessibility get to review those anonymously. We review them anonymously so we can make unbiased rankings of those submissions, choose people based on what we think are gonna be the best talks. After that, we get to go through again, de-anonymize them, and start building a schedule that works for us that is diverse demographically, racially, gender diverse, ability diverse, to make sure we’re capturing as many audience as we can to represent the people who come and attend, so they can hear voices that are part of their community.
And as the lead of the speakers team, I get to email with these people all day, every day, and help them navigate our submission process, our onboarding process, answer questions they have, recordings with them. So it’s really fun. I get to meet a lot of really cool people.
Amber: Yeah. We are so excited to dive more into what that process is like.
[00:04:50] Today’s Beverage
Amber: But of course, for every episode, we have a beverage. That is part of the craft part of Accessibility Craft. Chris, do you wanna tell us what we’re drinking today?
Chris: Yeah. So my job ahead of this podcast is considerably easier than the job, or jobs I should say, that Ryan just described. I had to go to a store and find a beverage that loosely fit with the idea of, like, a fall or Oktoberfest-esque theme. So I found a Vienna-style lager, and this is, a Texas-brewed beer from a company called Fast Friends Beer Company, and they are out of Austin, Texas.
It is 5.2% ABV, and I’m, I’m hopeful that this is gonna take us to a fall beer garden, at least in our heads because this will be airing in late September, so it’s starting to get to be that time.
Amber: I know it is weird because I know it’s probably September for you, Brian. Well, I mean, it’s technically, it’s September for all of us. But here in Texas it is still very much Summer. Like, we’re going to the pool. Nobody’s wearing any sweaters. But I like this, like, it is a very, like, the label design has that orangy red and gold and black style.
I don’t know, what is that? Like, an argyle pattern or something? In the shape of Texas and it, it looks like Fall.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber: You, you have the design background. Do you have any thoughts about the design of this can, Ryan?
Ryan: I like it. It’s so cool, and it did give me fall vibes. It’s been unusually warm in New Jersey, so we are also still having 80 and 90 degree weather. So I was hoping that reason I requested this was ’cause I was also trying to kickstart the fall vibes in my head.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: Yeah. It’s either this or…
Ryan: Like…
Amber: … pumpkin spice lattes…
Ryan: Yeah, it’s got the German beer hall kinda… It’s really cool.
Chris: Yeah, they, they did a good job conveying from seven, eight feet away what this thing might be like. And I was, I went to it like a, like a moth to a flame, man. This one was an easy find. I’m gonna…
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: … crack this open here.
Amber: This is a big can. Is this a full pint?
Chris: Let me see, where’s the ounces?
Amber: Do you think?
Chris: They always put the ounces somewhere. It is one pint, exactly. So it will fit, it will fit my pint glass.
Amber: Oh, good, you brought one. I forgot to bring a glass to pour in.
Ryan: What…
Amber: So we can see the pour off of Chris’s as he pours right now.
Chris: We have a hidden a not so, not so well-known merch shop where you can buy these.
Amber: If you go to shop.equalizedigital.com, you can buy Accessibility Craft and Make WordPress Accessible swag. We, I think in the history of that store, have made about $20 in profit. It was really more of just a experiment to see how accessible WooCommerce is out of the box, but it is a functional store, and we’ve bought a few things for ourself out of it, including the pint glasses, which was sort of fun.
Chris: I mean, since Ryan is a repeat guest now, maybe we should send him a coupon code after this. We can probably throw one together. Could get yourself a, get yourself an Ally the Alligator on a glass.
Chris: This smells and tastes lovely.
Ryan: It’s good. It’s nice and light. Crisp
Chris: Yeah. I’m trying to pick apart the nose still. I love the flavor, and it’s, it’s more full-bodied than I expected for a lager. It’s definitely… It’s got that European vibe to it. The, the nose is like a little bit, a little bit of citrus there from the hops. But for me, it’s kinda muted. I don’t know. Maybe it needs a minute to breathe. But yeah, it’s nice and full-bodied, good backbone.
Ryan: I like this a lot.
Chris: Bubbles, not like super bubbly
Amber: Yeah, you actually got almost no head off that when you poured it, it seemed like.
Chris: Yeah, the head died down real quick. It was there for a minute but then it died down. Also, I, I love the color. It’s like a… What would you call that? Like a orangish brown. Amber color, yeah.
Ryan: An Amber, yeah.
Chris: Yep.
Amber: Good pick, Chris.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is good. Uh-huh. Yes. We can imagine in our heads that the, that the weather matches and there’s some leaves blowing outside. This is transporting me to that place.
Ryan: (Cross-talk) … bonfire too. Yeah.
Chris: This is…
Amber: Oh yeah.
Chris: … definitely transporting me.
Amber: That is such a great fall activity. It’s so weird because it’s one of those things that I’m, like, thinking back to what were the fun things that we did in college or when we first were married and we lived on Nantucket, sometimes I would go with friends and we would have bonfires on the beaches and stuff.
And now I’m like, “I can’t remember the last time we had a bonfire, or I went to a bonfire.” It’s so…
Chris: And…
Amber: Sad.
Chris: It’s funny you say that because that is the exact place my head went when I took my second sip of this, was the patio at The Brotherhood where I used to run the kitchen. In the fall, we would do an Oktoberfest where it’d be like a whole pig roast and, like, all the traditional German sides because once people start leaving the island, ’cause it’s really seasonal, you d- you really try to pull out all the stops to get people to show up from the local community.
And so we would always do a big outdoor German cookout Oktoberfest thing, and we would have beers like this. And I can, I can feel myself sitting there right now with the cool, you know, East Coast air off the ocean and and the leaves falling.
Amber: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: You made this beer sounds so much better than I could have.
Chris: Well, it’s one of those funny things, right? Like certain, certain tastes can take you to a place, right? And this is one of…
Amber: Mmhmm.
Chris: … those for me. I just learned. I wasn’t expecting to have that experience just now, but…
Amber: It’s funny because the beer we drank in our last episode, it was so… It was also a Texas beer and it was like a cerveza style, and our guest Anne had requested that style. And I was thinking, “I’m not really gonna like this,” and it’s not totally my style of beer, except for when I was drinking it, I was like, “You know what this makes me think of? Like, happy hour on Friday afternoons with Chris’s fraternity in college.” And so I’m like, “No, I like it.” It, it just like took me to that. Like, that is that flavor.
Ryan: ‘ Cause this–
Amber: Yes.
Ryan: I feel like we’re in a Instagram food reviewer terrible part of our history where everyone’s just, “This is so good and crisp and crunchy and cheesy,” but I wanna hear how it makes you feel emotionally, and then that makes me want it more. Like…
Amber: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: Listening to you guys…
Amber: Yeah.
Ryan: … describe how it made you feel want– makes me wanna drink it.
Chris: Are there any types of beverages or beers that, that do that for you, Ryan, that take you to like a certain place? It can be an alcoholic or non-alcoholic.
Ryan: I was gonna say the second I smell a Keystone Light, I am back in a college basement, that’s for sure.
Chris: Perfect.
Amber: Is it like a college dorm basement with a bunch of guys where it kinda smells a little bit like a locker room too?
Ryan: Yeah, the worst dirty, yeah, dingy basements that…
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: No, this one is making me think of I used to live in a house with some friends in my 20s, and we had a fire pit out back. And right around this time of the year, as soon as it started to dip, we would like, nice Oktoberfest beers and make the fire, and we’d sit around outside and just drink the beers by the fire. So it’s really snapping me into that fall mood and making me think of that time.
Amber: Yeah, we over the summer, Chris labored in the intense 4th of July heat with my dad and brothers to lay out a patio so they could do a fire pit with rocking chairs all around it at their property. And then we came home, and I was like, “So now you’ve learned how to do that. I really want a fire pit in my backyard.”
Like, that sounds so nice, like just hanging out next to the fire in the cooler weather.
Ryan: Always my favorite… .
Amber: Okay.
[00:13:27] Ratings and Conference Tease
Amber: So just real quick, and then I think we should talk WordPress Accessibility Day which is another cool way to hang out with friends, although virtually. We always give these ratings, and you can say two thumbs up, one thumbs up, in the middle, thumbs down, double thumbs down.
Where do you land, Ryan?
Ryan: This is a two thumbs up. Very drinkable, very crisp. Makes us all think of our fondest fall memories. I love it. Can design is great.
Amber: Yep.
Chris: This is the first one in a while that’s taken me to a place, so I’m, I’m two thumbs up as well. This was great, and will continue to be great until it’s gone.
Amber: I am also two thumbs up on this one. So one of the few ones where we all like it.
[00:14:11] WordPress Accessibility Day Overview
Amber: All right, so talking about hanging out on October 7th through 8th, we are all going to be hanging out online, the three of us here, and let’s call it 3,000 of our other accessibility friends if we hit our registration goal and watching WordPress Accessibility Day presentations. And so we wanted to bring you here today, Ryan, to talk a little bit about what people can expect from the conference, and we can dive more into that process you highlighted just a little bit about what the speaker team does.
Do you wanna start by maybe saying how, roughly how big the speaker team was and how many applications there were, if you remember that off the top of your head? And how hard was it to pick speakers for WordPress Accessibility Day?
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[00:16:24] Speaker Selection Process
Ryan: Oh, good questions. So the speakers team is myself as the lead, and I have two other people who help me. I think I’m one of the smaller teams at Accessibility Day, perhaps, maybe. But we did get, if I’m remembering correctly, around 102 applications. You know what? I actually have it opened, I can tell you.
Amber: I felt like there were more than that, but was it only 102?
Ryan: It was actually 88. So we got 88 submissions this year which is pretty good to fill our 24-slot roster, minus our keynote. That’s 23 speakers, so we did get about four times as many applicants as we do have slots, which if anyone’s doing the math, makes that very hard to choose, and a lot of people do get cut. A lot of good talks do get cut. Chris was one of those really good talk submissions that did not make it through this year.
Chris: That’s okay. I’m emceeing, so I still get my T-shirt, and honestly, to me personally, that’s all that matters.
Amber: What would you have spoken about at WordPress Accessibility Day if given the chance, Chris?
Chris: So there had been I think I don’t know if like if overt is the right word, but a semi-overt request for AI-focused talks or topics. And I’ve been doing a fair bit, as regular listeners will probably notice by now to this podcast, with AI this year. And I was putting together a talk for beginners around to account for accessibility best practices in AI workflows and skill sets because I’m doing a lot with, with prompting and with AI skills and with feeding information and context into AI to get certain outputs in a really consistent way.
And my talk was gonna focus around, you know, what kind of prompts do you write to get an accessible output? What kind of guardrails can you give the AI based on what it’s generating? And, and, and that sort of thing. And so y- was, it was intended for beginners, but with some, with enough substance that people who were intermediate or advanced but were just getting into AI might still have been able to get something out of it.
That was kinda the, the c- concept I had.
Amber: But I think insider information. Lots of people read those when we’re like, “It might be interesting to have talks on XYZ.” And AI was, I think, our category that had the most submissions. So it’s almost like if you picked that, you had a lower chance of getting selected.
Chris: Totally. Totally.
Ryan: If I remember correctly, you did score pretty well in our anonymous review. You just were in a large competition pool there.
[00:19:15] Anonymized Reviews and Fairness
Amber: It’s always funny though, but this is why I think it’s good that we anonymize applications. Because, so two people from our team at Equalize Digital, Steve, who co-hosts this podcast, and our developer William, who’s been on a few times for people who listen, they did end up getting selected.
I, I was able to tell with the anonymous, because, like, we have someone who’s not on the speakers team, who’s not gonna be reviewing it go through, and they even, like, in the description if someone says their name or their company name or some important identifying information in the description, they’ll, like, redact it. They’ll just put redacted.
Ryan: Mm-hmm.
Amber: So it is very anonymized. It’s not just that we don’t see your name, it’s like we don’t know what company they’re from. We don’t know, like, all that kind of stuff. And I was able to guess Steve’s. I was like, “I think this might be Steve,” ’cause I knew he’d applied, and we’d literally had a conversation about something and internally as a company, ’cause we were struggling with it.
And so then I think he was like, “Oh, well, if we’re struggling with this, other people might be, too, and so I should submit it as a talk idea.” And it was like we had talked about it as a company maybe a few days before the speaker applications closed. And but then, like, William, I had no idea. And, and I think that’s good, because you don’t want it to be biased, and you don’t want to be like, “I’m just gonna choose my friends or people I work with at my company.”
And then you really are just going on the merit of the talk. So yeah, I guess maybe I gave you lower scores than some of the other ones. Sorry, Chris. I didn’t know it was yours.
Ryan: Oh, also, yeah, I was just teasing. Amber actually gave you a perfect five out of five on your talk.
But no, that was really and a good preview of how we do anonymize it and really make sure that we are judging our talks based on nothing other than the quality of the talk, what we think will be good for our audience. And then we do have a layer after that where we do de-anonymize to make sure we are a wide array of different types of speakers.
Like I mentioned before, we do want different demographics of speakers, so making sure we’re capturing voices from all around the world, and different backgrounds and different races and different levels of ability. So that we’re not hearing from the same perspective all the time, and we’re able to really shape that. I will say as an accessibility conference, we do end up getting a lot of diverse applicants, which is really nice. And we, I believe this year, had to do hardly any shuffling around once we de-anonymized. Our picks were pretty diverse right off the bat. But yeah, it’s really great to work with these people.
Amber: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:03] Diversity Stats Snapshot
Amber: Are there any stats that you can share about, like, the speaker diversity?
Ryan: There are. Let me grab them real quick. So this year..
Amber: Putting you on the spot.
Ryan: I should have been ready. Okay, so this year of our 24 speakers, including our keynote, we have representation from 11 different countries. Three of our speakers have never spoken before at all, so we have three first-time speakers. 38% of our speakers identify as male, 50% identify as female, (undecipherable percentage) identify as non-binary, 17% of our speakers are part of the LGBTQ community, 17% are non-white identifying, 46% of our speakers identified as living with a disability, and one of our speakers identified as living in poverty. So from those stats, you can see how we have really tried to shape talks around a diverse audience by giving them a diverse perspective of speakers.
[00:23:07] Diversity By Merit
Chris: Yeah. That’s really, really cool. I I love all of that, but in particular I love the 48% identifying as having a disability stat. I think that that for an accessibility conference that is of particular importance and super great to hear. Super great to hear.
Ryan: Very much calls back to the ” without us” quote that is the famous rallying cry of accessibility.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I like the methodology there, right? Because there’s the, there’s the anonymized based on subject matter and description, and then there’s a configuration around demographic to make sure you retain diversity. And I think it’s particularly cool or telling that even before you had that second adjustment period, you were already pretty much there just based on the merits of the talks. Which I think counteracts some of the arguments you hear sometimes around being intentional about having diverse speakers, and it should just be about the merit.
Not that I wanna get political here, but I think the fact that you did the merit first and then you barely had to adjust is maybe a data point that people could take away if they find themselves typically skeptical of these kinds of processes.
Amber: You know what I’ll say too that is I think always so interesting to me is that at least in our experience, and this is our fifth year of WordPress Accessibility Day, right? Or sixth? Fifth, fifth year. Yeah. ‘Cause there was one year off and it started in 2020. So this is our fifth year of WordPress Accessibility Day.
Our… Like, one of the things we frequently have to do when we’re trying to become more diverse is find more male speakers.
Ryan: Yeah.
Amber: Like, you notice there that, like, male was way lower than female or non-binary. And sometimes we have been like, “Well, we’re gonna have to remove a woman because we don’t have enough men,” which is so interesting because it’s like the opposite of most tech conferences are, like, trying really hard to get more female speakers.
Like, I literally have been invited to speak at a conference and they said, “We’re inviting you ’cause we need more women.” And I was like, “Should I be insulted? I don’t know.” Right? But, like, I find that really interesting about WordPress Accessibility Day that we’re, we’re doing the opposite of what people think we’re doing by making it more diverse.
Like, we’re trying to be like, “Can we get more white men?” Like, I don’t know why.
Ryan: … I think that happened… We de-anonymized and we were like, “There are no male speakers this year. We should fix that.”
Amber: Yeah. Yeah, last year, I think you’re right. It was like we had s- the top scorers were all female identifying, and we were like, “Hmm. Okay. Well, we need to go back through.” I don’t know. It’s interesting, too. I mean, w- we have a lot more female volunteers. I don’t know if it’s just something about the accessibility field that interests women more, but…
[00:26:05] Balancing Talk Ratings
Ryan: So I always kind of have my… It’s actually funny, and the reason have a large committee of people who review and rate talks too is for the same reason of we don’t want everyone talking about the same thing. And we tend to find and Amber, you fall into this category and Joe as well, the three of us tend to really like technical talks and rate those pretty highly. But then some of the members of our…
Amber: Yeah
Ryan: … marketing team tend to really like talks about there have been some about how you can make physical spaces more accessible or more case study, personal story type talks, and they tend to rate those higher than we do. So it’s a nice balance of what the different kinds of talks people kind of gravitate towards, and you can start to see where that happens.
But this year we had one talk in particular that everybody gave a five out of five to, so our entire review team gave it a perfect score, and this is the first year we’ve ever had a perfect scoring talk. So I myself was very excited about this, but I think everybody was based on the scores.
[00:27:21] Perfect Score Spotlight
Amber: So what is that talk? Let’s, ’cause obviously it got selected since everyone liked it. What is it, and why should people tune in to listen to this talk?
Ryan: So this one, and I the pleasure of recording this one with the speaker, so I have already heard this talk and can say it is a very good talk. It lived up to its perfect rating.
But the talk title is Accessibility is Not Enough: What We Learned Building the Website for The Dot Experience. So this is a talk that was given by the director of strategy and the creative technical director from Fieldtrip. They’re an agency in Kentucky, I believe. I hope I did not get that wrong.
Their names were Melody and Carl, they were hired to redo the website for The Dot Experience, which is a museum for blind people and people with seeing disabilities. When they approached this project, they reached out to the American Printing House for the Blind, where they were put in touch with Danielle Burton, who is also one of the speakers on this. She is a blind person who uses a screen reader to read, and she really helped guide them through the process of building an accessible website.
And I don’t want to give too much away, but the talk was extremely interesting, the steps they took especially because it was a, a website being built around a physical space. So the way they pulled inspiration from what was being done in the physical space and used that to help in the s- design of the website was really interesting, too. Yeah, really good talk. I enjoyed. If you guys want to watch it, which I hope you want to watch all the talks on Accessibility Day, but they are in the 16:00 UTC time slot, so they will be on directly following our keynote speaker. And like I said, our first ever perfect score talk, and I did get to hear it already and can say it is very good.
Chris: Well deserved to chase the keynote and be the first one out of the gate. Those, like, real world experience things, right? I, I think that’s maybe underrepresented in a lot of accessibility related content that I see, where it’s kinda the same cycle of getting started, the laws, how to test, you know, what tools to use, a lot of the old suspects.
And I really appreciate that this one is going… seems to be at least going deep on a s- very specific project that had specific outcome requirements. Super…
Amber: Well, I think there’s a lot to be said for the fact that building a really good accessible experience is not just about compliance or like passing, you know, the checkers or a checklist of any sort, like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And I have not seen that talk, so I am very much looking forward to tuning in live, and I will definitely be watching it live.
But I think from what they’ve said in the description, they’re gonna talk a lot about like what is this really, because it’s not just did I pass this success criterion?
Ryan: Yeah, and that was their whole crux of, we know what is technically compliant, but what’s actually compliant for people are usable. And I did have a slight error in what I said, only did they reach out to the American Printing House for the Blind, that’s actually the organization that is building the museum, so that’s how they were connected with this project.
Amber: Gotcha.
Ryan: But no, Chris, that was a good note you made, too, and we have tried this year especially to get and choose more talks that did have a personal perspective of what living with a disability is like or how to work with those people who live with disabilities and trying to get a more personal perspective on all of that. So…
Amber: Yeah.
[00:31:21] Keynote Ed Summers
Amber: I wonder if you want to talk about the keynote, because we haven’t talked about that yet, and the keynote is the one talk where we actually spend time thinking about who we might like to have speak and reach out to them personally and invite them. So could you talk about what our keynote’s gonna be this year?
Ryan: I can. I also had the pleasure of recording this talk. Being the person making the schedule has some perks, I’ll say.
Amber: You get all the awesome previews.
Ryan: Our keynote this year like Amber said, we do, before we even open our call for speakers, kinda when we first come back, for the new year, we start brainstorming who we might wanna talk. And further than that, it’s what we kinda wanna showcase. So two years ago, there was a lot going on around accessibility law, so we wanted someone who was an expert in that, and that’s when our keynote was Lainey Feingold. Last year, we wanted… There was a lot going on with accessibility laws in Germany. Then we found Vitaly Friedman, a German person who came and talked for us.
This year, we were again focusing on those real-world experiences, personal stories, and a name that came up was Ed Summers who’s the Head of Accessibility at GitHub. This was a time that none of the organizers had a personal connection to him. Usually, we’re able to leverage our network to get in touch with someone, so I cold reached out to him on LinkedIn, just sent him a message saying who I am, “I organize the speakers for Accessibility Day. This is who we are. We’d love for you to come keynote for us.”
He responded back almost immediately with, “I would love to. Thank you for considering me.” So I got on a call with him. He is a wonderful person, so fun. He lives in North Carolina. He is a blind individual. Has a lovely guide dog named Loki, a beautiful German shepherd that he walks around with. And like I said, he is the Head of Accessibility at GitHub, so it’s safe to say he knows what he’s doing.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: His keynote talk is The Renaissance of Achievement for People with Disabilities, and again, not to give too much away, but extremely interesting talk. He dives into how with the emergence of every new technology, people with disabilities, especially users who are visually impaired, are typically left behind and have to catch up. So he talks a little bit about how with the advent of the internet, when it first came out and graphical interfaces were invented, not really invented for people who can’t see them. So it took a few years before markup became able for people with visual disabilities to see and use. Then we got into few years there of Flash design and no accessibility going on the web. So he said there was about 10 years there where the internet was just mostly unusable for people.
Then he said smartphones came out, it was the same thing. For a little bit of time, there was– they just weren’t usable for people who could not see. Then dives a little bit into AI, what the emergence of AI means, and how this one is unique in the field because it’s a text-based technology. It is very friendly for people with visual disabilities. And then he goes into why this is a renaissance of achievement and how he himself is leveraging these AI tools to help kind of bridge the gap left behind by other technological advances for people who always see a graphical interface.
So really good talk. Great guy. I was lucky enough to meet with him a few times before and then record his talk with him, and I think everyone’s gonna really enjoy it. He’s a great speaker, great topic. His dog does not show up in the talk, I’m sorry for anyone who got excited when I brought her up.
Amber: You can see her or hear her description on his speaker profile photo because he did upload a picture of himself with Loki, and I think he mentioned that in the alt text when he wrote the alt text for the image. So she is on our website. We had a whole discussion. They were like, “Should we list her?” Some of the people on the marketing team, but I was like, “She’s not the speaker.”
But she’s there, so you can see her in his profile photo.
Ryan: And a fun fact about Ed and Loki, the– is a viral post a few years ago of Ed on an airplane and somebody getting really upset with him for having a dog on the airplane. And the… Yes, and the– there was another person on the plane who is an influencer, and she caught the whole thing, recorded it, told Ed and the other person who was having a problem with him and his dog that she was happy to switch seats and sit next to him.
They talked the whole time, became friends. The post went viral. One of our other organizers, June, who leads our marketing team, saw that post, and that is how she became familiar with Ed, started watching his talks, and she’s actually the one who recommended him this year. So because of that, Ed made a great friend that day, and we found out about him and invited him to speak at our conference, and now all of our attendees get to hear him talk.
Chris: Yeah, I was just gonna say, the, the perks of being in charge of s- of speaker selection indeed. Multiple meetings with the Head of Accessibility at GitHub is what I, what I heard come out of that, which is amazing.
Amber: Now he knows who you are.
Chris: Yeah, he knows who you are which is pretty, pretty awesome.
So people who are thinking about volunteering for WP Accessibility Day may be wondering if it’s worth your time, the connections you make, the connections you make.
[00:37:21] Schedule Picks Roundup
Amber: So Chris, have you looked at the schedule? Are there any talks that caught your eye as a non-developer?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. We gotta do the same little round robin thing we did last year where we go through. So there were, there were a couple as I was skimming ’cause I obviously, when the s- when the schedule dropped, I immediately shouted it out on LinkedIn and, and looked through it so that people would start to, you know, see it and build some buzz.
There were two. One was Kevin Andrews, who’s I would say a, a friend of us and of Equalize Digital. He, he has been on the podcast. He’s done work with us in the past, and great guy. His talk title is, You Didn’t Fix Accessibility, You Automated the Problem: AI in the WordPress Ecosystem, specifically. I’m…
Amber: He was the one who beat you!
Ryan: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: In the AI category.
Chris: I am glad it’s this one and not mine. Zero, zero issue with this because I’m super interested to hear what he has to say on this subject, given his, his background in accessibility and the work he does in, in higher education and in WordPress for the amount of time he’s done it. I think that’s gonna be a really interesting one. I’m looking forward to watching it.
And then this one is more on the sales side for me which is Gen Herres’s talk Real World Remediation Pushback, which I think is kinda bookending the very last spot in the schedule. She’s, I think she’s the last one of the, of the speaker lineup, right? As far as time.
Amber: Which is not a bad thing. I’ll say this is an interesting thing because for folks in the US, we start at, it’s 10:00 AM Central Time, and then the last talk is from 9:00 to 10:00 AM Central Time the next day. And people will, you know, they sign off, go to sleep, but they come back on, and those last couple talks at the end will always have several hundred people on them just like in the beginning.
So it’s not bad to be the last talk. It is also a good spot.
Chris: Yes. But her real world remediation pushback one is interesting because ahead of her writing this talk, and I don’t, I didn’t know why she reached out to me, but she DM’d me on LinkedIn, and she was like, “Hey, do you have any good ones of, like, people who have rejected accessibility suggestions that your team has made or, or pushed back on things in audits?”
And unfortunately, I had to tell her like, “No, not really for us, because the people who are reaching out to us are already at a point where they don’t need to be convinced because something has happened in their world that they’re reaching out to s- to a specialist now themselves.”
But I am super interesting– interested to see she has in store for this one, because if she reached out to me, that probably means she reached out to a lot of people in addition to drawing from her own very extensive experience. And I’m, I’m looking forward to hearing some of the maybe some of the wins. I’m sure there’ll be a few horror stories sprinkled in there too, or things that make you eye roll or slide out of your chair. But I’m, I’m looking forward to that one regardless. What about you, Amber? Any highlights from the, from the list?
Amber: Yeah. So I know it’s always so hard, right? Because I love so many of them.
Ryan: Yeah they sound good.
Amber: But yeah, I will say I’m sort of interested in India Anderson at 22:00 UTC is gonna be talking about From Plugin to Product Experience, Accessibility Lessons From Improving WooCommerce Extension Onboarding. And I’ll admit, like our Accessibility Checker plugin, it does not have an onboarding wizard or any sort of thing in it, and it’s a thing we’ve talked about.
We really ought to build this, and we just haven’t yet. And I think like she’s gonna talk about things about how it gets discovered in the WooCommerce marketplace all the way through. So as a fellow plugin developer, I always find it really interesting to hear how other plugin product companies are working on their experiences.
So I’m looking forward to that one. I… Let’s see, the ones that I recorded, so Simon Miner, who’s also spoken at our Meetup, and he might… Has he spoken for WordPress Accessibility Day before also? Do you remember if he’s a repeat speaker?
Ryan: His name sounds very familiar. We do have a number of repeat speakers this year.
Amber: If not on WordPress Accessibility Day, for sure you can find his talks on Accessibility Craft in our archive from presenting at Meetup. But he was one of our other AI talks. AI, Accessibility, and WordPress: Deciding What To Trust, Test, and Do Yourself.
So I think that’s good, ’cause he’s gonna go over sort of that decision process on should I use AI for this or not. I know it says intermediate, but I think it could be very beginner friendly, so I wouldn’t let that worry people. You know, I think the another one from, like, a business perspective that is interesting is at 6:00 UTC on the 8th, Sanna, and I’m not even gonna try and say their last name, is gonna present Who Owns Accessibility After a WordPress Site Launches?
Which is, like, a really good question. Is the client responsible? Is the developer responsible? What if you have a maintenance contract? Like, all these things. So I definitely am interested in that one as well.
Ryan: I like that one too, ’cause that is something we also run into of, well, whose responsibility is this now if a random person in the company’s marketing department makes a change and nobody else knows about it?
Chris: Mm-hmm. That’s, that’s the real world for you.
[00:43:06] Team Talks Shoutout
Chris: I, I do feel like we have to, we have to shout out, even though it didn’t make Amber or I’s individual lists of talks we’re personally looking forward to we have two team members speaking. We’ve got to say the names of their talks and when they’re talking.
So shout out to our own senior plugin developer, William Patton, who will be speaking at 20:00 UTC WCAG and CI/CD Catch Accessibility Bugs Like Any Other Bug. It is an advanced talk. And then our CTO and frequent host on this podcast, Steve Jones, will be presenting, and I think I’m actually emceeing for this one, if memory serves When Does Page Zoom Become an Accessibility Failure? At 13:00 UTC. So shout out to both of them for making the cut in this competitive process.
Amber: And I’ll say I’m not a developer, but I actually recorded William’s session with his. It’s really good. Like, it’s got, he’s got a lot of really actionable things, but also if you are a developer who’s sometimes annoyed if talks, you’re like, “Eh, there’s nothing, like, technical enough,” you feel like conferences don’t do a good enough job with developers, it is definitely a developer talk.
‘Cause there are a few things he was talking about that I’m like, “No idea. Okay, that sounds great,” right? So, and, and that’s a thing I love. Like, we try really hard to make sure that we have talks that are going to appeal to everybody in a lot of different roles. So we have some technical talks. We have some business talks.
We have design. We have just, like, personal story talks. Like, I think there’s one talking about neurodivergence and some other just, like, personal experiences of living with a disability. So there should be something for everyone.
Ryan: That’s a good thing. I was also gonna call that out when you mentioned it, ’cause we did talk a lot about how we make sure our speakers themselves are diverse, but we also do take a lot of effort to make sure our talks are diverse. So not only are we targeting for those different roles, there are a variety of talks for beginners, intermediates, and experts. So no matter where you are in your journey of accessibility, if you’ve maybe never even heard about it until today, there’s a talk for you. If you are an expert who’s been working in it for years, there’s a talk for you. So we do try to capture that whole range, so there’s something for everyone.
Chris: Amazing. Amazing. Well, we are about at time.
[00:45:41] Where To Find Ryan
Chris: Ryan, I wanna give you the opportunity to tell people where to find you. Tell, tell them anything else you wanna share about Second Melody and what you do with that team. Anything at all.
Ryan: Yeah. Cool. So thank you guys again for having me. It’s always a blast, and I will always take the opportunity to get a little tipsy in the middle of a workday. This was a especially easy sendoff for me ’cause I am going on vacation next week, so this was a nice way to end my week.
But like you said, I do work at Second Melody. We are a branding studio but we do so much more than that. Our main offering these days is strategy. So if you have a problem, we can give you a solution. We’re not really in the business of, “I need a website, here’s a website.” It’s more, “Why do you think you need a website? What are you really trying to accomplish? Here’s what we think the best path forward for that is.”
And we run the gamut, so anything from naming, if you don’t even have a name for your company, we’ll help you name. Logo development, visual identity, verbal identity, messaging pillars, social media, collateral design and development. So we do, like, physical collateral for out in the world, and then my team handles everything web-based. So anything you need, we can help out.
We do specialize in pharmaceutical, but we are industry agnostic, so we do work across all different industries, and you can find us at secondmelody.com. Drop a note, reach out and say hi, or let us know if you have anything you wanna do. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Ryan Bracey, just my name. You can find me on Instagram, @ryanbraceyforreal. I don’t really post, but I’m on there. You can also find my bread account @braceybreads on Instagram. I post a little more frequently on there, and you can see the bread I’m making.
Amber: And it is worth shouting out that Second Melody did the logo design, the web design for WordPress Accessibility Day, so we can thank them for our amazing branding and identity, which they created.
[00:47:51] Register And Support
Amber: And for anyone who has not yet had a chance, WordPress Accessibility Day is totally free.
You can register. We are a 501[c][3] nonprofit, so y- if you want to make a donation, we very much appreciate folks who are willing to make a donation to help us cover the cost of the Zoom events platform. We have human captioners who come. We have sign language interpretation that we pay for.
But if you can’t, you can… You don’t have to make a donation. Totally free. So you can learn more about the conference, see the full schedule for yourself if you go to wpaccessibility.day/2026. I think that’s a wrap. We’ll see you all soon. And Ryan, I hope you enjoy your vacation. Cheers to that.
Ryan: Cheers.
[00:48:41] Podcast Wrap Credits
Speaker: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at EqualizeDigital.com.