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Re: Accessible CMS for writer AND reader? Contao? Wordpress? Ghost? Other? And opinions of Markdown for authoring?

for

From: Graham Armfield
Date: Oct 12, 2015 10:56AM


Can only speak for WordPress as that's what I've been involved with.

Headline: WordPress accessibility is improving - both on the front end and
in the admin screens - although there is still some way to go.

Over the last three years or so the Make WordPress Accessible Team (MWAT)
have raised many defect tickets on the accessibility of the admin screens
which have resulted in considerable improvements. Now (in theory) all new
bits of admin functionality will have undergone some kind of accessibility
testing and remediation before they get adopted into WordPress core.
Regular weekly accessibility testing sessions are organised by MWAT member
Rian Rietveld and we're always looking for more people to join in those.

Much of the testing has been with screen readers, not so much with Dragon
NaturallySpeaking.

Re the front end, any experienced WordPress theme developer who also knows
about accessibility can build a fully accessible WordPress theme - there is
now nothing in the core WordPress functionality to prevent that.

Regarding the WordPress theme repository, another MWAT initiative has been
an additional accessibility part to the Theme Review process. Themes that
pass this extra check get an accessibility-ready tag. It's currently a
voluntary to put a theme through this accessibility check, but it's an
aspiration that eventually all new themes should go through it. Despite
being optional there has been some take by theme authors and there are now
71 themes that carry the accessibility-ready tag - see
https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/accessibility-ready/. This is up from 32
in March 2015 and about 15 last autumn.

For me the real problem about accessibility progress lies with WordPress
plugins. These plugins provide many extras that people like on their sites,
things that change or add to the markup eg - contact forms, carousels,
lightboxes, etc.

There is currently no accessibility review in place for plugins, and there
probably won't be in the foreseeable future. Very few plugin devs have
actually taken accessibility into account when building the functionality
so it's quite likely that your perfectly accessible WP site can become less
accessible when using such plugins.

Hope that helps.


Regards
Graham Armfield



coolfields.co.uk <http://www.coolfields.co.uk/>;
M:07905 590026
T: 01483 856613
@coolfields <https://twitter.com/coolfields>

On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 3:23 PM, _mallory < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 02:40:54PM +0100, Jonathan H wrote:
> > I rather like Markdown, but how is it regarded in the VI community?
>
> People I know (who tend to be developers or at least quite comfortable
> with computers) have said they like Markdown and find it pretty easy.
> Of course these folks were writing their markdown in text editors where
> punctuation would be set high like when you're programming, rather than
> filling in HTML forms (as most CMS admins seem to be these days).
>
> However I don't know how non-techies like it, and I'm not sure how
> easy for people it is to find and fix things like markdown whitespace
> errors which then do weird HTML grouping sometimes. Usually I notice
> those visually and then hunt around the md file itself trying to
> find where some newline might be missing. Bleh.
>
> Take this as a single anecdote if nobody has any research. There's
> also of course the possibility of polling this group yourself, right?
>
> _mallory
> > > > >