You may recognize the name WordPress from reading your favorite blog, but it's actually a very flexible platform for web publishers and now, thanks to some dedicated individuals, a more accessible platform for website developers. Joseph Karr O'Connor, an accessibility consultant who is also heavily involved with the WordPress accessibility team, joins us to explain what the team is doing to make Wordpress a more accessible platform both for users and site administrators. Blind Bargains audio coverage of CSUN 2014 is generously sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind.
Transcript
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Hide transcriptDirect from San Diego, it’s BlindBargains.com coverage of CSUN 2014. The biggest names, provocative interviews, and wall-to-wall exhibit hall coverage, brought to you by the American Foundation for the Blind.
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Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J.: We’re here at CSUN 2014 with Joseph Karr O’Connor. He is an accessibility consultant and also works with the WordPress Accessibility Team, and he’s here to talk about it. Welcome to Blind Bargains.
JO: Thanks. Thanks very much for tracking me down and getting me to talk a little bit about WordPress. I’ve been following the Blind Bargains tweets forever, and if I bought everything on Blind Bargains, I’d probably be bankrupt.
J.J.: We do what we can, I guess. A lot of people might be familiar with WordPress as the biggest blogging platform out there, but of course there’s a lot more to it than that, and it’s useful for a lot of people who want to create websites. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what the WordPress Accessibility Team is and what you guys do?
JO: We’re a collection of people who are giving back to the open source community, helping developers at WordPress and developers who are volunteering like ourselves to understand accessibility needs, to understand what it takes to do an accessible website. What we’re focusing on is core. We’re focusing on the backend.
We just completed, or are nearly complete with an accessibility check of the admin screens from a keyboard point of view. We don’t have enough labor bandwidth to do a full-on WCAG 2.0 AA assessment on all the points, but we did have enough people to do a keyboard accessibility pass.
That yielded some good information. Visual focus is uneven, if it exists at all. Keyboard sometimes doesn’t work all the way through a screen, and of course, that’s vital to screen reader users and other uses of assistive technology. We had some conversations with people and we put up a ticket about the visual focus so far, and we’ll be extrapolating ideas from our reporting to make more tickets to help with keyboard accessibility. So surely, we will arrive at some good actions for the developers to take.
J.J.: Sure. As a developer, of course, there’s a couple sides to this. You want the backend to be accessible, and I’ve played with WordPress a bit, and of course, the core, while it could use some improvement, it certainly is doable at this point, depending on what you’re trying to do. But of course, it gets a little more dicey when you come to a lot of the teams, because there’s thousands upon thousands of teams that can be created.
What have you done to work towards both the backend, for people who wanted to implement a theme, and also to figure out which themes might be the most accessible?
JO: Well, the WordPress Accessibility Team has devised an optional accessibility theme check. There’s quite a rigorous theme check process right now for themes to go into the WordPress theme repository. If you’ve ever looked for “free WordPress themes” in a search engine, you will turn up some evil stuff with all kinds of tricky backends and ads that you can’t see and all sorts of backend stuff. So we’d advise against that.
But if you look in the Theme Directory, you’ll see that there are only a couple of themes that are actually accessible. We’ve devised an accessible theme check-in process to be part of the theme check-in process as a whole.
J.J.: How does that work?
JO: You ask for the tag “accessibility-ready,” and the tag is called accessibility ready because your theme can only be ready for accessibility; the content is what makes it accessible also.
J.J.: Of course.
JO: But you ask for the tag “accessibility-ready,” and that flags our attention, and then we will check your theme for accessibility and say whether or not you get the “accessibility-ready” tag.
J.J.: So it’s not that developers can sell a point on their own themes; they have to get approved, essentially.
JO: Yeah. There’s a little sticking point in the proceedings right now, because we just got this done, so anyone can claim accessibility right now. But the “accessibility-ready” tag is only appended to a few themes. So as we do outreach to theme developers – for instance, there’s a very popular business theme right now, and we’re going to send a message to the theme developer and say, “Hey, would you like to engage in accessible development? It would certainly help your users,” and see if he wants to engage.
J.J.: Especially as you start to promote to any business that wants to create a WordPress theme site, it really would behoove you to search for themes that are marked as accessible ready as your starting point.
JO: Yeah, there is a great demand for accessible themes. I know because in higher education, where I worked for years, this was the question that always came up. Wasn’t there an accessible theme? Well, no, there’s not an accessible theme. But there are some accessible themes now.
I have a project called Cities, where people in cities around the world – Mumbai, Canberra, Boston, New York – have pledged to make accessible themes. The first few themes of the Cities project have come out. One is called Nashville, and that will be vetted by us on the Accessibility Team and get the “accessibility-ready” tag soon. That’s for places of worship, mosques, churches, congregations, and it’s done by Anna Belle Leirserson, who is a wonderful person. She’s a great developer, and she’s put up a theme in the Cities project. There are some other themes that have come out of that development. Accessible Zen is one. That’s already in the Theme Directory.
J.J.: Would you guess there’s other themes that are perhaps relatively accessible now that just haven’t been flagged as such?
JO: We haven’t engaged in assessing other themes for accessibility, although there may be some themes that are partly or mostly accessible, and we might, like I say, reach out to developers to see if they want to engage in a fully accessible product.
J.J.: Sure. One more question. I know you have to get to a presentation in a minute. As a blind person, searching for a WordPress theme for perhaps a site I want to develop, is there any field or way to have a visual description? I know the theme might explain, “this would be good for a church” or “this would be good for a business, but I would also want to know how is this theme going to look visually? Is it a two column layout, a three column layout? Is there any way to get that information?
JO: With the Cities themes, I have asked all the developers developing Cities themes – and this is starting with Anna Belle – to develop a visual description, a text description of the visual look of the theme. I think that will help people make decisions better, if they have a text description to read.
J.J.: Great. Definitely we’ll be interested in following all the developments. If people want to get more information, perhaps browse the Theme Directory or also look at the implementation for the backend, how can they get more information?
JO: Just put in your favorite search engine “make WordPress accessible,” and you will find the blog that we maintain in the WordPress.org site conglomeration. From there, you can contact us. I’m @AccessibleJoe on Twitter. You just tweet me, and I’ll talk to you for hours about this, or send you 100 tweets or whatever it takes.
J.J.: Sure. If you’ve downloaded WordPress currently, is some of that incorporated, or is that going to come in the next version up?
JO: Well, 3.8 is the current version; 3.9 is due out soon. There are some improvements in 3.9 directly relatable to the work of the Accessibility Team. 4.0 is due out in August. We have more tickets and more solutions for accessibility than ever before, and the team is really working well to bring this all together and help make WordPress accessible.
J.J.: Great. Hey, thank you so much, Joe.
JO: Thank you very much.
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J.J. Meddaugh is an experienced technology writer and computer enthusiast. He is a graduate of Western Michigan University with a major in telecommunications management and a minor in business. When not writing for Blind Bargains, he enjoys travel, playing the keyboard, and meeting new people.
