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New 5.0 Target Date
Based on the stability, testing, and reports on the release candidates for WordPress 5.0 so far, we are now targeting Thursday December 6th for public release and announcement. 5.0.1 will open for commits soon, and will be an area people can choose to focus on at the contributor day at WordCamp US ...

For those of you who are reading this in your inbox, the context for this post is the recently-published, (as in yesterday), target release date for WordPress 5.0, which rolls out the new Gutenberg editor. I’d like to say I’m surprised by this, but I’m just not. I find myself asking a few questions: First, I find it very difficult to believe that a piece of software that is being released with known, significant issues, (up to and including significant accessibility issues, and no, that doesn’t just apply to assistive technology users), can be declared stable enough for release. Accessibility problems, just by themselves, are bugs. Well, they are if you claim to consider accessibility a priority. Next, if the plan was to release the Thursday before WordCamp US, (and I have to concur with those who believe it has been), what was the point of all those one-on-one office hours? How is anyone in the WordPress community supposed to believe that Matt is dealing in good faith when he has apparently convinced himself of the superiority of his own definition of quality and stability, and that his cause is so right and so perfect that it’s worth literally sneaking a major release out the door while everyone is traveling to WordCamp US? I am not opposed to the concept of Gutenberg, and I never have been. I know the current editor is not perfect, and that it can be improved. But this whole thing wreaks of fanaticism, arrogance, dishonesty, a complete disregard for any standard definitions of quality control, (there’s no way, absolutely none, that enough time for actual testing, complete with stress cases, could have been performed between RC 2 and RC 3, and that’s not even counting RC 1), a complete disregard for those of us who work with WordPress users outside of what is apparently a hermetically sealed bubble of perfection in which Matt lives, and the day-to-day experience that has informed our comments since day one, along with a healthy dose of hope as a strategy when it comes to Gutenberg. The question and answer session at this weekend’s State of the Word address is going to get interesting, as is the dev chat this Wednesday.

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Prototypes and production
Don’t build prototypes with a production mindset. Don’t release prototype code into production.

I don’t think I’m too far off base to suggest that so many of the problems we face on the web could be avoided if the prototype mindset discussed in this article were limited to the prototype phase by developers and designers, and kept completely separate from the production process.

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I’m only part of the way through this and I’m already feeling bad because I haven’t sat down and artiulated a bunch of goals for the new year. The only one I have so far is importing my entire Facebook archive into my personal site. I totally feel Brad on the blogging thing though because it’s enjoyable but I think spending all the time on social media kind of drains that. There’s a solution for this though: Indieweb, and blog posts don’t have to be five thousand words long. They can be a single photo or a bookmark or, like this one, a record of listening to a podcast episode. There are already lots of resources for adding various post kinds functionality to WordPress sites, including bookmarklets and apps for your phone. Definitely makes blogging easier.

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XSS in hidden input fields
At PortSwigger, we regularly run pre-release builds of Burp Suite against an internal testbed of popular web applications to make sure it's behaving properly. Whilst doing this recently, Liam found a

I can absolutely see a case where users would interact, and and therefore become vulnerable to this exploit: Keyboard-only users, screen reader users, and speech recognition users. So this might be worth looking into, especially if you’re adding a ton of keyboard shortcuts to your app and calling it an accessibility improvement.

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This is a good read regarding the event-stream ongoing saga, and I agree with it, but I also have some things to add to it. For those of you who may not be familiar, (non-developers), event-stream was pulled from Node Package Manager, (something that gets used pretty frequently when building software in order to manage dependencies, otherwise known as other code bits you need in order to run/build your code bit), because it relied on another package which was found to have vulnerabilities. It was then handed over to someone else, who promptly added a cryptocurrency iner to it, at which point the internets freaked out. Frankly I don’t completely blame the new maintainer for adding the cryptocurrency miner. There are very large corporations who have no problem using open source software for their benefit, all while not supporting the maintainers. See for example: Apple and Microsoft. And if you can’t be relied on to hit that donate button, well then we’ll just use your processing power because eating habbits need to be supported. I’d like to add to the post I’m linking to though that, while I think code does need to be simpler and thus easier to understand, I also think maybe we need to simplify our build processes. But back to the “understanding” point, reading code is a learned skill, and I think to a certain extent it’s on the users, (and in this case the users are developers), to learn how to read code. As much as I’d like code to be simpler, outside of everyone who writes code taking courses/reading books on best practice and then applying all that, I don’t see this happening.

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Playboy.com Sued by Man Alleging Website Not Accessible to the Blind
Playboy.com sued by man claiming website is not accessible to visually impaired.

I’m trying to decide if TMZ counts as accessibility hitting the mainstream or not. Also, someone should let them know that, (while Playboy Magazine has been available as part of the National Library Service for the Blind and Visually Handicapped for decades), in both braille and audio formats, blind people do not read Playboy for the articles. Some blind people are avid consumers of adult entertainment just as some sighted people are. Also, dear Playboy, if Pornhub can figure out how to make their entire site accessible while preserving its nature and content, you can too.

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I came across this while reading an article about deleting Facebook even though deleting Facebook is a privilege. I appreciate the note of hope at the end, because I don’t believe simply disengaging from all these problems, (including the secondary ones like how we deal with politics and social issues as a society), is truly an option. Disengaging is not an option in my opinion because these issues are going to effect our lives and the lives of those around us whether we engage or not, and I think it’s better to have at least a slight idea of what’s coming and what’s happening than no idea at all.

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I’m glad to see that WCAG 2.1 is being adopted so quickly. It was released on June 5, 2018, WCAG 2.0 took a while to be adopted as the standard. 2.1 does a lot to address the needs of not only people with disabilities, but also people who are older, (sorry screen reader users, it’s not just about us and it never has been), and I’m pleased to see that we didn’t have to wait two years to see it adopted. I’m also glad the National Federation of the Blind resorted to structured negotiation and not a lawsuit, and would like to see more campaigning in the organization’s ranks for this approach.

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I’m really, really glad to see that Deque Systems is participating in/holding a hackathon at this year’s WordCamp US contributor day along with the Accessibility Team and those on the core team who are familiar with WordPress’s testing environment, in order to integrate aXe-Core into our core. Can we call this inception yet? I use Tenon, (a competing tool), and of course I’m a Tenon fan, but I also really like aXe-core. I just find it harder to use as a screen reader user trying to fight with Firefox’s developer tools, and Chrome’s developer tools are less accessible than Firefox’s. I’m still working out some last minute details to hopefully make it to WCUS this year so I can participate. I don’t know much about WordPress’s tests but would love to help in person any way I can. Plus, it’s WordCamp. This is an incredibly positive step forward for both WordPress as well as Gutenberg, and nothing makes me happier than to see it. This is the starting point on the road to making Gutenberg one of the most awesome things on the planet in my opinion: a block editor and eventually a complete site editor with drag-and-drop capabilities that everyone can use.

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Dear #WordPress leadership: Get your shit together because this is one of a handfull of people who are actually #a11y experts who are also skilled React devs and your squandering WordPress’s hard-won rep on a11y for an arbitrary deadline is a damn shame.

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Push without notifications by Jeremy Keith (Adactio: Jeremy Keith)
What if users could be sure they wouldn't be annoyed by websites after they grant permission to receive notifications?

I clicked on the link for Jeremy’s presentation, only to be directed to his book on this subject, which I will promptly be buying. I spent a little time looking through the A Book Apart catalog and didn’t realize that had so much cool stuff. And yes, as a user, I would really appreciate not being annoyed on a constant basis by websites I’ve given permission to notify me. I gave Slack permission to do that on the old computer and that was one of the first things I didn’t set up on the new one.

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The first thing I can tell you that may help you solve part of the problem you’re experiencing is that, unless you have WordPress’s wpautop function overridden, you do not need to add paragraph tags to your code. YOu simply need to separate paragraphs by pressing the enter key twice, as you would in a word processor. If you’re like me and you despise the fact that WordPress picks on the humble paragraph tag, you can disable it using either by filtering wpautop or by using a plugin like Toggle wpautop. To add your syndication sources, (at least for things that aren’t yet supported by the Syndication Links plugin), I would recommend adding some custom buttons to your editor. YOu can do that by using a plugin called Tiny MCE Advanced. YOu can also do it with code but if you’re just trying to get something done quickly and you don’t feel like writing yourself a custom functionality plugin for the buttons, this will do it without all the trouble.