Rian Rietveld 6:16 am on September 30, 2025
Tags: accessibility ( 109 ), make.wordpress.org/updates, wp-a11y-docs ( 8 )

WP A11y Docs update September 2025

This update informs you about:

The Knowledge Base is ready to contribute.
Issues on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ with what needs to be written or reviewed.
The work planned for October 2025.
How you can help.

Knowledge Base is ready to contribute

In September we made the website wpaccessibility.org ready to contribute. All accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) content from the current handbook is copied into this website. Also new placeholder pages are made, for new content.

Yoren Chang @1fixdotio worked hard to create a preview option for pull requests for the site, so everyone can review proposed content without needing a local installLocal Install A local install of WordPress is a way to create a staging environment by installing a LAMP or LEMP stack on your local computer.. She is really amazing.

The How to contribute pages are written, also for contributors who don’t work with GitHub and just want to write or review.

GitHub issues with what needs to be written or reviewed

Rian wrote issues on GitHub for each documentation page belonging to Standards and best practice. For review and rewrite of the content. Each issues is labeled by topic.

For example the page Headings in the content now has an alert, about what needs be done with the content and a link to the related GitHub issue.

How can you help?

On How to contribute you can read the different ways to contribute to this project. If you want to help writing, pick an issue from the list of Todo issues on the projectboard Wp A11y Docs. Only contribute if you know the topic well or have good resources to share.

Note: Please write the content yourself and use AI only to translate or to check the quality of your English.

Plans for October

@rianrietveld will start writing content for the Knowledge Base, now everything is mapped out. She will also give presentations about the project at the WPMeetup020 (Amsterdam) and WPMeetup030 (Utrecht). You can help her by sponsoring Rian’s time and expenses.

@Aminul will work on the migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. of the current handbook to a new Github repo accessibility-team-handbook on github.com/wordpress. Only the Accessibility Team related info will stay into that handbook.

@joedolson and @1fixdotio work on the remaining issues in wpaccessibility.org itself.

#accessibility, #make-wordpress-org-updates, #wp-a11y-docs

Rian Rietveld 7:13 am on August 29, 2025
Tags: accessibility ( 109 ), make.wordpress.org/updates, wp-a11y-docs ( 8 )

Update project WP A11y Docs August 2025

How’s the work going on the documentation for WordPress about accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) (WP A11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Docs).

This update informs you about:

the brainstorm session about the content;
new contributors that joined in;
the work planned for September 2025;
how you can help.

Note: The new website for the Knowledge Base is stil in its set up phase: content needs to be added, accessibility issues need to be fixed. So we will not publish the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org here yet, but if you want to see the progress, please visit the GitHub repo wp-a11y-docs and follow the link mentioned there.

Brainstorm session about the content

Paul van Buuren, Annelies Verhelst, Wendie Huis in't Veld , Savi Sinnema, Caitlin de Rooij, Johan Huijkman and Rian Rietveld proudly standing before a wall of post-its.

In our previous update we shared the plans for the setup of the Knowledge Base. In Phase 1 we are going to gather all information about accessibility for people that use or build for WordPress and add that to website.

But how to organise that the best way? With a group of seven people, involved in WordPress and/or accessibility, we brainstormed about this for an afternoon. Resulting in a wall full of Post-its.

Thank you Paul van Buuren (@paulvanbuuren), Annelies Verhelst (@anneliesjenl), Wendie Huis in’t Veld (@dolgelukkig), Savi Sinnema, Caitlin de Rooij and Johan Huijkman!

The main conclusions where:

There needs to be a section about how to start, where to begin if you are new to accessibility and have no clue where to start.
To help users get to the knowledge they need, a reading guide is necessary. Per target group about what they need to read and where to find it. Content must be published once, but the way to get there can differ.
How to test was the most requested topic in the survey “Which WP accessibility documentation do you need”. There must be dedicated menu item with how to and checklists.
Each of the “Topics” with a “Standards and best practice” menu item will also have a “how to test” section.
The point of this Knowledge base is not to rewrite all the content there is out there but to write down what’s important in this context and link to reliable resources.

You can find the full report of the brainstorm session in the Google Doc: Brainstorm session WP A11y Docs.

New contributors join in

Kudos to Yoren Chang (@yoren) for making it possible to preview pull requests for the website in GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ pages. Annelies Verhelst is helping with content reviews. Gary Jones (@garyj) set up the rights for the wp-a11y-docs repo and helps with pull requests. The NL Design System gave permission to translate Dutch content into English and publish it on the Knowledge Base.

Work planned for September 2025

Copy all accessibility information from the current handbook to the new website.
Move the info that needs to stay in the current handbook to a repo on the WordPress account and publish the handbook from there.
Work on extending the content in the Knowledge Base.
Fix the accessibility issues on the website.

You can follow the work in our GitHub Project board.

How you can help

There are several ways you can help this project:

Pick an issue from the Todo column and work on it. Please comment with the issue that you want to do this work.
Review a pull request from the PRs in review column . With the description of the pull request there is always a link to a preview, so you don’t have to dig into the code. Add your review as a comment with the pull request.
Sponsor Rian’s time and expenses, at the moment 25% of her time is sponsored.
Read through the content that is already published and let us know what you think.
Follow the accessibility-docs SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel on wordpress.slack.com.

#accessibility, #make-wordpress-org-updates, #wp-a11y-docs

Rian Rietveld 11:05 am on August 8, 2025
Tags: accessibility ( 109 ), make.wordpress.org/updates, wp-a11y-docs ( 8 )

Update project WP A11y Docs July 2025

In June, Joe Dolson (@joedolson) and Rian Rietveld (@rianrietveld) started the project to update and extend documentation for WordPress about accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility). We now abbreviate the project as “WP A11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Docs”.

This update informs you about:

how the documentation will be set up;
the work we did up to now;
what we are going to do next;
how you can help.

Setup of the documentation

The last month we talked with many people in and outside the WP community about the best way to share a11y (accessibility) knowledge in a sustainable way. We came to the following setup.

Phase 1

In a dedicated website WP Accessibility Knowledge Base we gather all information about accessibility for people that use or build for WordPress. In this site we add content and figure out what the best way is to provide the WP community with the best a11y info.

The current Accessibility Handbook will be renamed Accessibility Team Handbook.
And will contain only information about the team itself, how to contribute and when the meetings are (etc). The information about accessibility itself moves to the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base.

Phase 2

On developers.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ a new section will be created, the Accessibility Handbook where the info for developers and designers will be added, taken from WP Accessibility Knowledge Base. This section will live as a repo on the WordPress GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ account.

The setup of using first a dedicated website to write and to find out the best way to organise content and later add relevant content to the developers handbook, is discussed in the Documentation Team Slack channel. Thank you Jon (@kenshino) and Milana (@milana_cap) for your feedback.

Work in July and August ’25

We created a website for the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base. The website is build in Jekyll using GitHub pages which makes it easy for contributors to add content in markdown as open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project.

The related Github repo is wp-a11y-docs.

Note: at the moment the content contains only placeholder text, from August 11 on we are going to fill that site with real content.

What’s next?

On August 20, Rian will host a brainstorm afternoon about which content we need to provide for the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base and which content is useful for developers.wordpress.org. And also about how to organise the content in a way people can easily find what they need. This will be with people from the Dutch WordPress community and Accessibility community.

After that session Rian will create issues on GitHub for everyone that wants to help to pick up.

How you can help?

Pick an issue from the wp-a11y-docs/issues! After August 21 there wil be many to choose from.

#accessibility, #make-wordpress-org-updates, #wp-a11y-docs

Rian Rietveld 1:14 pm on June 11, 2025
Tags: accessibility ( 109 ), make.wordpress.org/updates, wp-a11y-docs ( 8 )

Start project “Accessibility documentation” on WordCamp Europe 2025.

At the contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. of WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe in Basel @rianrietveld and @joedolson started the work to update and extend the documentation about accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) for WordPress. This is what we agreed:

Scope

The current documentation in our Accessibility Handbook needs to be improved on.

We are going to work on up to date and well maintained information for WordPress, about what is needed to deliver accessible work and how to properly test for accessibility.

With clear do’s and don’ts, practical examples, and easy-to-follow documentation.

Setup

We update and add content in the in the current Accessibility Handbook. On developers.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ a section will be created for accessibility specific code examples, for reference in the Handbook.

The content will be moved from the current WordPress pages to markdown files in GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/.

We want to set this up as an open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project, everyone with accessibility knowledge can contribute to the documentation. The accessibility team will project manage and safeguard the quality of the content.

Work

The current content in the Handbook will be copied to a GitHub repo on the WPAccessibility GitHub account. We work from there to create the content in markdown.
We will conduct a survey in the WordPress community on which documentation they need.
The structure of the Handbook will be reorganised to fit the users need better.
Once the set up and the main content is ready to go, that repo will be transferred back to the WordPress account and mantained from there.
On the WPAccessibility Github account Rian will create and manage a GitHub project with all the work that needs to be done. Such as the content that needs to be rewritten and created. That way it’s easy for more people to contribute and work on different content.
There will be a process of reviewing in place, to make sure the content is up to WordPress and accessibility standards.
Code examples and other technical documentation will be published in an accessibility section of developers.wordpress.org or will be included in with current developers content, depending on the topic.
The updated documentation and requirements for the accessibility-ready tag will be added to a logical place on the themes handbook.

Rian will set up and project manage this work. She will report every two weeks in this blog about the progress.