Leadership Change At Wordpress Is A Wakeup Call For Developers

by 10 Best Design

A recent change of leadership at WordPress highlights the challenges that accessibility presents in relation to web design and development. Rian Rietveld used to lead the accessibility team at WordPress; this team was tasked with making the new Gutenberg and publishing platform accessible to users who live with certain disabilities. After months of leading this project, Rietveld announced her departure from the team, and her reasons are related to the complexity of coordinating code implementation when it must deal with accessibility.

Rietveld noted that the development of the Gutenberg platform had expected to address accessibility after the fact, and this is what made things difficult. After writing numerous tickets to address the accessibility shortcomings, finding developers within the community became a monumental task. One of the biggest problems is that the platform had not been progressively tested during development; therefore, multiple accessibility issues were found at the end.

Since WordPress is known as an open source community, development teams are expected to work with the experts and resources available. Once again, not having worked on accessibility from the beginning made things very difficult. In an open source community, not all volunteers will be able to tackle monumental challenges; in fact, most will work on tasks that do not take up all of the the time they are willing to donate.

The parallel that web developers can draw from Rietveld's departure from the WordPress accessibility team is as follows:

  • When accessibility is a must in a specific project, it should be addressed from the beginning. Rietveld noted that something as seemingly innocuous as making a date or calendar picker accessible can turn into an accessibility nightmare if it needs to be coded after the fact.
  • Securing resources in the early stages of the process is a must. This may involve hiring outside developers who specialize in web accessibility; however, their work should start at the time the project is being wireframed.
  • Testing should be conducted from the beginning and at various stages, ideally by users who are visually impaired or who are familiar with the use of screen readers and keyboard navigation. For more information click here https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress-accessibility-team/.