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Must Read: Unspeakable Conversations
I started reading Disability Visibility this week to expand my understanding of the experiences of the one in five people with disabilities in the US. I had intended to do a blog post on things I learned, what struck me, etc. However, instead of reading what I think, please read Unspeakable Conversations (which is the…
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How I Debug
For most of my career I thought there was always something missing with how I debugged, like I needed to set-up an advanced error reporting system that would log and track down every error seamlessly. Then, I would really know how to debug like a 1337 haxor. Now that I have a big kid job,…
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Across the Atlantic Handoffs
Automattic is a large worldwide team, made up of smaller, worldwide teams where everyone works remotely. That was one of the things that made me excited to work there, but also very curious as to how it worked in practice. Would the timezone differences slow us down? Would we unintentionally get in each other’s way?…
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Setting up NVDA on Parallels with macOS
This is mostly personal notes that I hope can be helpful to someone else. A lot of this info I gathered and consolidated from Deque’s super helpful post, Using Windows Screen Readers on a Mac. Get Parallels Download Parallels and follow the set-up. I don’t want to put instructions here, as they’ll likely change and…
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If It Looks Like a Duck: A Cautionary Tale
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.” I recently worked on putting a plan together for improving the accessibility of a search component on WordPress.com. The existing interaction worked like a combobox where the focus was kept on the search input and…
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Podcast Player block: Behind-the-Scenes Accessibility
On my team at Automattic, we built the new Podcast Player block released in Jetpack 8.5 and on WordPress.com. This post is intended to give you a behind-the-scenes style look at all the little details that went into attempting to provide a good, accessible experience for everyone. I’ll be focusing a lot on Screen Reader-specific…
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The 5 Minute Accessibility Audit
Being great at something takes a lot of dedication and practice. But, you can often be OK at something without too much difficulty. This article is to help you with the latter part. Knowing just enough to be able to make an educated guess on the accessibility of a site or component/plugin. Can you use…
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Learning via Terrible Ideas: Replacing Text on Click, Part 2
In Part 1 of Learning via Terrible Ideas, we learned how to: Open the Console Set a variable Add a Click Listener But adding a click listener doesn’t make it accessible to people who use a keyboard or different kind of assistive technology. To make our example accessible, we’ll need to: Give a “focus indicator”…
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Accessibility 101 for Content Creators
A perfectly coded website will still break down if the content isn’t written and built accessibly. This article is intended to give a no-coding-required breakdown of how to make accessible content. I’ll use WordPress as a basis for examples when relevant, but the same principles apply to however you build your website. Use Headings Headings…
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Learning via Terrible Ideas: Replacing Text on Click, Part 1
JavaScript is pretty fun. You don’t need to know much to start playing around with it. Let’s jump in with a Terrible Idea that You Should Never Do.™️ Note: This article is intended for beginners (and kids!), but has plenty of extra tidbits along the way. I’ll be intentionally glossing over most topics, but give…
Jerry Jones 