[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how to improve the accessibility of your WordPress website.
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So on the podcast today, we have Joe Dolson. Joe is a WordPress plugin developer, a core committer and a web accessibility consultant. He’s part of the Make WordPress accessibility team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.
His recent presentation at WordCamp US entitled, finding and fixing the six most common WCAG 2 failures, highlight some of the key areas where websites are not as accessible as they should be. The areas we discuss are, low contrast text, missing alternative text, empty links, missing form labels, empty buttons and missing document language.
Joe explains what each of these problems are, both in terms of how they can be fixed as well as what people with accessibility requirements might experience when they visit your site. We talk about how you can equip yourself with the tools that you need to diagnose these issues and online resources you can use to discover more about website accessibility.
It’s Joe’s opinion that you’re better off making a start right now, carrying out incremental changes rather than attempting to solve every single problem that your website might have. Begin the journey and take it one problem at a time.
We also chat about the fact that there’s an ever-growing legal compulsion to make websites follow accessibility guidelines. Lawsuits are going through the courts with greater regularity. So now might be the time for you to look into this topic.
That being said, Joe cautions against the use of tools, which purport to solve your accessibility issues with minimal effort. A variety of pop-up solutions have emerged onto the market, which claimed that they can make your site compliant with almost no effort. Joe is adamant that these promises are almost always false and that there’s real work to be done on each website, as they’re all unique and have unique problems to solve.
Typically when we record the podcast. There’s not a lot of background noise. But that’s not always the case. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be bringing you recordings from a recent trip to WordCamp US 2022, and you might notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the
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This article was written by Nathan Wrigley and originally published on WP Tavern.