Accessible WordPress Themes – Page 2

note

· 16 Elul 5779 (Monday 16 September 2019) · 1 minute to read

I don’t know if the WordPress project has any official ties to the Free Software Foundation. I did a quick Google search but didn’t come up with anything.

We are a project whose members/contributors value diversity and inclusion, and we have done a lot of work to make our official events, (WordCamps) welcoming to everyone, including people with disabilities and children.

Richard Stallman is free to spout whatever disgusting, bigoted things pop into his brain, and even to offer non-apologies which serve no other purpose than to cover his ass.

And we, as a project, one around which a thriving community has formed, are free to disassociate ourselves from him and his comments.

Whether we like it or not, we are the gateway for a lot of people who normally wouldn’t touch free software on their own.

note

Amanda CAARSON

· 28 Av 5779 (Thursday 29 August 2019) · 1 minute to read

I posted on Monday about the situation where the blind man and his lawyer were sanctioned by the court for scheming with regard to ADA lawsuits. I still stand by that post, and the general condemnation of this, but I’d also like to spend some time exploring the other side of the coin and what contributes to this, at least from the side of the blind people involved.

note

Amanda CAARSON

· 23 Tammuz 5779 (Friday 26 July 2019) · 1 minute to read

I just got done attending this week’s WordPress Accessibility Team meeting, in which I got a chance to try the new Slack, since that’s what the WordPress project uses for communication. I remember when WordPress started using Slack back in 2014 at the last WordCamp San Francisco, and I have personally and professionally given Slack a metric ton of crap over the intervening years with regard to accessibility.

note

Amanda CAARSON

· 9 Sivan 5779 (Wednesday 12 June 2019) · 1 minute to read

Dear creatives with disabilities, including musicians. So-called exposure by way of contest, competition and, (in a lot of cases), volunteer work is bullshit. Don’t run after it. Your time and talents are just as valuable as those of your abled counterparts, and any person or organization trying to trick you with promises of exposure or large impact in exchange for free work is a vulture worthy of your contempt. Your time and talents do not become less valuable just because you may be unemployed now or because you’ve been unemployed for a long time. Dear people and organizations: People with disabilities are not a source of free labor.

read

Thoughts On: “Nothing Fails Like Success” by Jeffrey Zeldman

Amanda CAARSON

· 6 Nisan 5779 (Thursday 11 April 2019) · 3 minutes to read

Nothing Fails Like Success by Jeffrey Zeldman

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

#Let’sFixThis To tell the truth, I don’t have an answer to the questions raised by Jeffrey Zeldman in Nothing Fails Like Success, but as someone who participates in the IndieWeb, and who has seen nothing but benefit from it, both personally and professionally, I have to hope that we can fix what we’ve broken. Not only that, I think we have to fix it, both because this is the only web we have, and because, really, we’re the ones who convinced the general public to use things like Twitter and Facebook and the like. We turned them onto these things, it wasn’t just marketers. I’m not suggesting that any of us should succumb to paralyzing guilt over any of this, and that includes Zuckerberg. For one thing, it’s a whole lot easier to see what’s wrong in the rear-view mirror than it is through the windshield, and for another, paralyzing built would prevent us from doing the fixing. We need to be clear-eyed when it comes to what we’re fixing, and in my opinion there’s a hell of a lot of things that need fixing.

If we have any hope of repair, I think we as designers and developers need to start with ourselves and our industry. We need to get our act together and start behaving like we’re a profession, and we need to discontinue the pervasive practice of rewarding all the wrong things. Those are just for starters, and they’re large undertakings in themselves. And once we get our own house in order, we’ll need to spend some time doing some seriously hard work convincing the genereal public that the content we convinced them to start putting in the hands of the big social media networks is in fact valuable enough to own and control. Next comes making it easier to own and control. Despite every word of criticism I’ve leveled against WordPress’s new editor, I believe Matt Mullenweg is on the right track, at least as far as the concept goes, because I believe the new editor will make it easier for the average, non-technical person to own and control their content, and at the end of the day, average non-technical people are the majority, not designers and developers.

I have to hope we can accomplish all these tasks. Otherewise, the only thing left is to burn everything to the ground. I hate to think we might be at that point. I’m still optimistic about the web, about its openness and independence, about it’s fundamental accessibility, and I’m optimistic about fixing it and making it easier for everyone to participate in the web. To that end, I hope to have at least a small part in fixing it.

note

Amanda CAARSON

· 1 Heshvan 5779 (Wednesday 10 October 2018) · 1 minute to read

Dear #indieweb I am going to do my very best to not flood Indienews with #ID24 web-related talks but you have no idea how difficult this is going to be. We’re only four hours into a twenty-four hour conference and there’s been a ton of really, really good web-related stuff here.

note

Amanda CAARSON

· 22 Tishri 5779 (Monday 1 October 2018) · 1 minute to read

I can remember a time when the #WordPress customizer was off limits if you used a screen reader. I’m playing with it now and even though I know there’s more work to do I’m so proud to see how far it’s come. And no, I’m not praising my own work, I’ve had nothing to do with it.

read

Amanda CAARSON

· 22 Tishri 5779 (Monday 1 October 2018) · 1 minute to read

5th Annual Hacktoberfest Kicks Off Today, Updated Rules Require 5 Pull Requests to Earn a T-shirt

DigitalOcean, along with GitHub and new partner Twilio, are sponsoring the 5th annual Hacktoberfest. The event was created to encourage participants to make meaningful contributions to open source …

I’m wondering if @DictationBridge has any issues that need pull requests. I’m also wondering if pull requests on docs count. I should check the rules because a limited edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt would be nice to add to the collection.

note

Amanda CAARSON

· 22 Tishri 5779 (Monday 1 October 2018) · 1 minute to read

#ID24, (otherwise known as Inclusive Design 24), is happening again next week, and the sensible part of my brain is saying “No, really, you shouldn’t stay awake for twenty-four hours and it doesn’t matter how good the talks are going to be because you are not in your twenties anymore”, and the rest of my brain is saying “This schedule is awesome and it will be so much fun to participate on the social medias with everybody and bring some IndieWeb goodness and then shove it all to your Facebook page”. I think I know which part is going to end up winning. I need to take Noter Live for a spin because I haven’t done so yet on the new computer, because I haven’t done that yet and live tweeting the whole conference a couple of years ago was fun.

Amanda CAARSON

· 22 Tishri 5779 (Monday 1 October 2018) · 1 minute to read

Now that I’m familiarizing myself with this theme, (I tested it before it was bundled into core as part of the WordPress Accessibility Team but haven’t given it much of a look since), I’m seeing that we do have two menu locations. Getting back to my comments re: including the link always in the post, I looked at your reply to my tweet on your site and noticed that you included the tweet. For some reason I was thinking the original link would be pulled in even though it’s not displayed in the tweet, but I’m just going to blame that on not enough caffeine. 🙂 So I will go ahead and change that setting. I also need to add and/or rearrange some categories on this site while I’m at it.

note

Amanda CAARSON

· 22 Tishri 5779 (Monday 1 October 2018) · 1 minute to read

I need to write some text for the front page, and link the various post kinds in the menu. And seriously Facebook pages, there’s a lot of hate going on for microformats 2 and you really need to address that because it’s just not cool.

bookmark

Amanda CAARSON

· 22 Tishri 5779 (Monday 1 October 2018) · 1 minute to read

The WordPress Twenty Sixteen theme: Good, Bad or Ugly? - A Bright Clear Web (A Bright Clear Web)

My review of Twenty Sixteen, the new theme from the WordPress team. Learn about its features, its pros and cons and who it's best suited for.

This is a really good post to use as a guide if you’re a blind person trying to work with the Twentysixteen WordPress default theme. It walks through the different steps you can take to customize the theme for your site, without using code. It also gives some detail about the various color schemes that come packaged with the theme.

note

Amanda CAARSON

· 22 Tishri 5779 (Monday 1 October 2018) · 1 minute to read

Just a quick test to see if publishing to this Twitter account using my own website works correctly. #indieweb