Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, host Michelle Frechette interviews Ryan Bracey, co-organizer of WordPress Accessibility Day and director of web development at Second Melody, discusses the upcoming event with Michelle. Ryan, who has been involved with the event for four years, shares insights on the speaker application process, event format, and accessibility features. The event, a 24-hour global virtual conference, aims to feature diverse speakers and will include pre-recorded talks followed by live Q&A sessions. The host and Ryan emphasize the importance of accessibility in web development and encourage listeners to apply as speakers.

Top Takeaways:

• Call for Speakers Now Open:WP Accessibility Day 2025 is currently accepting speaker submissions for its global, 24-hour virtual conference, scheduled for October 15th, 2025. The event focuses on accessibility within the WordPress ecosystem and is seeking approximately 75 proposals to fill 23 speaker slots plus one keynote. Submissions are open through May 26th. Organizers are especially encouraging talks from individuals with lived experiences of disability and welcome a wide range of accessibility-related topics.

• New Format: Pre-Recorded Talks with Live Q&A: This year, the event introduces a new structure featuring pre-recorded presentations followed by live Q&A sessions. This format offers greater flexibility for speakers while ensuring a more stable and inclusive experience for attendees. In appreciation of their time and expertise, speakers will receive a $300 honorarium.

• Commitment to Accessibility and Inclusion: Accessibility is at the core of WP Accessibility Day. The event will include live captioning and American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation to ensure it is accessible to a global audience. To support diversity and fairness, speaker applications are reviewed anonymously. The organizers are especially encouraging submissions from individuals in underrepresented regions and communities. Proposals promoting overlays or superficial fixes that do not adhere to true accessibility standards will not be considered.

Mentioned In The Show:

• WordPress Accessibility Day
• Second Melody

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Ryan Bracey (Organizer, WordPress Accessibility Day)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Ryan Bracey 00:00:00  You can hear me okay?

Michelle Frechette 00:00:03  Welcome to our Cache Up plugin. And today I’m catching up. Get a little play on words. Well, WordPress play on words with Ryan Bracey, one of the Co-organizers for WordPress Accessibility Day, which will take place this year in October. October. I’ve forgotten. I know it’s the 15th. That’s my birthday, right? So I thought, but I can’t remember. If it starts on the 14th. It goes into the 15th or 15th into the 16th. I kind of forgot. I should know. Sorry. I’m just didn’t look it up to remind myself. But it’s my birthday, and everybody should absolutely come celebrate my birthday and accessibility at the same time. That’s an aside. Ryan Bracy is with me today. Ryan, tell us a little bit about yourself before we dive right into WordPress Accessibility Day.

Ryan Bracey 00:00:53  Well, thanks. Hey, I’m happy to be here and cache up with you. But my name, like you said Ryan Bracey. I am the director of web development for an agency in New Jersey where I’m located, called Second Melody. At my agency, we do everything pretty much across the gamut of branding, copywriting, web design, web development, production materials, social media marketing, anything you need, we can handle. I am lucky enough to be given the latitude to spend my time volunteering for organizations I believe in, such as WP Accessibility Day. So I joined this group about four years ago as a volunteer moderator. Three years ago, I came on as an organizer. During that time, I helped with the new brand and look and feel and design of the website. So if you go check out WP Accessibility Day, WPAccessibility.Day, you can see that site. If you go to 2025.WPAccessibility.Day, you can see the site for this year’s event. Starting last year and then again this year, I’ve been the lead speaker’s organizer. So I am handling anything and everything related to speakers, along with a few other volunteer organizers.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:15  I love it, and I think we just won a Webby, did we not?

Ryan Bracey 00:02:19  You did, we got an honorable mention for the Webby Awards, for the WP Accessibility Day website.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:27  I think that’s super cool. I’ve never been part of a project that won anything associated with Webby, and I’ll take an honorable mention any day because it kind of feels like first place, right? Like I mentioned this, I love it. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. So you are the lead, as you said, for speakers, which has a lot of moving parts. Especially once we’ve got the call for speakers out, which it is right now. Out. And so can you give us a little bit of an update? How many people have applied so far or how many talks? I don’t know if people can apply for more than one talk and how that works, but ballpark it.

Ryan Bracey 00:03:05  So I wasn’t prepared for this question. As of last week, we had 31 applicants so far.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:12  And how many speakers do we need?

Ryan Bracey 00:03:15  We do need 23.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:18  23. So we want options.

Ryan Bracey 00:03:22  Yes, we want a lot of options. So if you have a good idea for accessibility in the realm of WordPress, it can be general accessibility as well. We take all kinds. Please go apply to speak again 2025.WPAccessibility.day and let us know what your ideas are. This call is opened until May 26th. So there are about 20 more days until we close the call.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:46  Excellent. And is there any limitation? Is there are we looking for people only in certain parts of the world? Only on certain kinds of accessibility? Like, what are some of the, if there are any. What are some of the boundaries that we’ve set for that?

Ryan Bracey 00:04:02  These are great leading questions and things I should have just said. My answer the first one.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:06  No, that’s otherwise I just have to not be here. Like it’s my job to ask the questions so you can answer them.

Ryan Bracey 00:04:12  Right. So, yeah. If you’re not familiar with the event, WP Accessibility Day is a 24 hour global event. We run for 24 hours straight. It’s a completely virtual event. It’s free to attend. As a speaker, we do gift and honorarium, honorary honorarium.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:31  Honorarium.

Ryan Bracey 00:04:32  Honorarium of $300. So we do compensate you for your time if you come and speak. Like I said, it’s a 24 hour event, so we do have 24 slots, one keynote, 23 speakers. It’s virtual, which gives us the benefit of being able to be global. So we like to have a selection of speakers from all over the world, as well as any kind of walk of life. So we look at varieties of statistics in gender, diversity, race, anything. We want to have a nice composition of speakers to represent all audiences. To say though, our selection process is completely anonymous. So it is based round one on the merits of your talk. We will review what it is you put in, rank based on that, after which we go. We meet together as a committee and kind of talk through what we want to speak about this year, how we want to shape the conference we will deanonymize, and then make sure that we are representing a variety of groups of people across the world. Like I said, both geographically and statistically. This year, too, we are making a little bit of a change in the way we are holding our conference. Historically, it has been live speakers. This year, for the first time ever, we are doing pre-recorded talks, with a live Q&A, so it’s a little bit of a hybrid. Speakers will pre-record and submit their talks to us, which we will then play on the day of the conference, followed by a brief Q&A session so that the speakers can interact with the audience members who are there on the day.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:17  I love this for a couple of reasons. Number one, as somebody who has given talks virtually before, when you record it, you have the opportunity to do edits. You have the opportunity to have some fun with editing, right? So you can bring different features and things like that into it. Also, it gives you the opportunity to feel like you’ve perfected it before you’ve turned it in. And let’s say that your wi-fi is terrible because of a storm or whatever the day that you’re supposed to present. We can play that for you. And it’s not causing all kinds of issues during your talk, which I think is also having put on several live events in the past, is one of those things where you just have to cross your fingers and hope that people’s wifi works. But when you are submitting a pre-recorded talk, we can make sure that it does, which I think is a wonderful thing. What do we have as far as accessibility for those people who are watching? 

Ryan Bracey 00:07:17  That’s good. And just to echo what you said to it, we’re excited for this new format. And I think our tech team is especially excited for this new format. It presents some of its own challenges, but it does help remediate things like people’s wifii, not connecting or even with running a global event. You do have people who mistranslate the time that they are so to show up.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:42  Yeah, timezones are so challenging.

Ryan Bracey 00:07:44  Time zones are very challenging. Yes, I learned that firsthand. But so as an attendee, though, we do provide full captioning and ASL right within Zoom. So you can either read our captions or look at our ASL interpreter. So you’re able to intake the information as well. I will note that our conference is currently, sorry, English. So all of our talks are presented in English. We do have a translation team who works very hard after the fact to try to get all of our talks translated in as many languages as they possibly can. But as it stands right now, we’re only able to present day of in English. So there’s that one.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:34  And American and American Sign Language as opposed to other sign language.

Ryan Bracey 00:08:37  ASL. Correct. Yeah. that is to say, if any of our viewers do speak another language and wish to volunteer and help us translate after the conference, please go to our website again WPAccessibility.Day and you can volunteer or apply to volunteer to translate. And I believe our translation lead would be very happy to have you.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:59  I know she would. Absolutely. So as far as, as presenters and speakers, you do not have to be disabled yourself in order to be a speaker. to present on accessibility. Correct?

Ryan Bracey 00:09:14  Correct.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:16  Although we do have we have had some in the past.

Ryan Bracey 00:09:19  Had some.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:20  Which I think is wonderful because getting those first hand experiences from people talking about how accessibility works for them, I think has been really, really instrumental in helping people understand why it’s important, for sure.

Ryan Bracey 00:09:34  Correct. And we are actually, if you were to look at our call, some of our suggested topics, just kind of highlights what we’re looking for this year in way of talks that maybe help differentiate us a little bit from previous years. So we are looking a little more for anecdotal talks, if that makes any sense? So exactly what you just said. If you are a person living with a disability, if you’re able to come on and share your experience within the space from your perspective, that would be a phenomenal talk. And I think our audience really gets a lot out of stuff like that too.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:12  Yeah, first hand experiences, storytelling are ways that really engage people. And I think that we’ve seen that in the past for sure. Instructional is good too, but you don’t want 24 hours of just instruction. You want to be able to interweave that with people’s personal experiences.

Ryan Bracey 00:10:27  I know personally, I’ve learned so much from people who tell you their experience because you can listen to instructional talks forever and you hear, this is the way this needs to be done. This is what you need to do to help this group of people. And then you hear someone from that group speak about their experience and say, well, actually, what you’re supposed to do doesn’t really help me that much. But if you did it this way, that helps me a lot more. And it just gets you thinking in a different mindset, which is always a great thing to take.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:58  Absolutely, absolutely. So some of the other questions that I have about it are, do you have to attend live or will these be available afterwards? So for example, 24 hours is an awfully long time to stay awake and take in speakers. So how would I manage that if I’m not able to be awake for all the talks?

Ryan Bracey 00:11:20  Well, your first option is lots and lots of coffee.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:24  Copious amounts of caffeine.

Ryan Bracey 00:11:26  Yeah, it keeps a lot of our organizers going. But no, we do work to get pre or sorry to get post event recorded sessions out as fast as we can. Those include the captions, the ASL. There’s a little bit of an introduction. Preamble. The Q&A will be part of that, so you’ll get the entire experience. Pre-recorded, post event recorded and uploaded so that you can go watch it.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:57  Absolutely. I think that’s really cool. Which means that if you are interested in what happened last year or the year before, the year before that, those already exist on our YouTube channel. And you can go back and look at some of those. And sometimes it’s inspirational to see what’s been done in the past, to think of ideas, to submit a talk for this year or even next year. One of the topics that I say, there are very few topics that we say we don’t want. But one thing is, if you are absolutely a proponent of overlays, take it someplace else because we don’t believe in overlays.  They are not actually accessible. So don’t don’t come tell us about how awesome your overlay is because that talk was not likely to get upvoted.

Ryan Bracey 00:12:40  No, you will not get many votes on that one.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:42  Exactly how many speaker submissions are we? Are we looking for? Do we, like, love a certain number? Like, would we love to see a hundred so that we can kind of distill that down and make sure that we have a nice, you know, a nice, diversity of topics?

Ryan Bracey 00:13:00  Yeah. I like to target around 75, about three times what we need. Just exactly what you said. A nice diversity of topics, but also diversity of speakers and location of speakers just gives us a lot to, like a lot of material to work with and choose from. So that is what I hope to get. I think we broke that last year. We got over 80, so hoping to get a little more this year.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:28  Yeah, it makes it a lot easier to select speakers, but not everybody’s given us the same topic, for example.

Ryan Bracey 00:13:34  Right.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:35  Absolutely. What other things can we look forward to, or what other things would you like to mention that I haven’t asked you about yet?

Ryan Bracey 00:13:42  Oh, goodness. Yeah, I think just we’re pretty excited for this new format. We’re excited to see what everyone does with it. I hadn’t even considered that speakers will have the ability to add effects to their prerecorded talks, so I’m kind of excited now that you said that to see what people do and how much fun they have with it. Please, if you’re doing that, no strobing lights or anything like that, but.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:12  Exactly.

Ryan Bracey 00:14:12  I’m excited to see what we come up with. And as mentioned a few times, if you do have a good idea or anything in the accessibility space, if you’re an expert, if you are not an expert, but you’re an advocate, if you are someone who experiences a disability, if you have a team at your company where you are trying to promote or ingrain accessibility. Any of those things make great talks. So please, please go apply. I said the talk is open until the 26th. You do have about three little under three weeks left and we’d be excited to review them all.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:50  Absolutely. And we do, of course, get a lot of submissions about visual, blind and visually impaired people, low vision, that kind of thing. But there are so many other disabilities that are, that impact people when they’re, when they’re on a website. So if you have an idea for something outside of visual. So maybe it’s auditory, maybe it’s manipulative or manual ways to use the web. We would love to hear those, especially because I think those are topics that aren’t spoken about as frequently, and they are just as important for other parts of our community. So, yeah, so we’re open to all your ideas. Get them into us. Like I said, unless it’s about overlays, because we don’t want overlays. But that’s a topic for another day for sure about why we don’t like those.

Ryan Bracey 00:15:41  Yeah, that’s a whole other podcast.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:43  It is for sure. you can’t buy tickets yet, I say buy. Tickets are free. You cannot register for your tickets yet. That will be coming later this summer. And but we do have spots still available for sponsors. So our. Excuse me, our platinum and gold are gone. Think silver might be gone? We still have some bronze spots left. There might be a couple silvers left. I’ve kind of lost track.

Ryan Bracey 00:16:07  I think bronze and silver are left. 

Michelle Frechette 00:16:07  Yeah, okay, a couple silver left. If you’re interested in sponsoring, this is a. This is a wonderful opportunity. We are a 501C3 nonprofit. Sponsorship doesn’t necessarily count towards that. Donations do, of course. But your sponsorship helps others learn about how important accessibility is on the web. And of course, there’s benefits to being a sponsor as well. And the call for media partners is also open. So if you have a podcast, if you have a newsletter or an online organization that you might be able to help us get the word out about this and you’re interested in being a media partner, you can go to a 2025.WPAccessibility.day and find that call as well. So both of the open call for sponsors, speakers and media partners are currently open. I think we’ve hit them all. And I said if I missed anything, Ryan?

Ryan Bracey 00:17:01  I think that’s good. And then yeah, I guess also to mention if you yourself don’t have an idea for a talk, but you know someone who you think might please share with them as well.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:11  Yeah, encourage them.

Ryan Bracey 00:17:11  Yeah. And I guess one more note. I believe this is true. I hope it’s true. If you are a certified professional accessibility core competencies with the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. These talks do count towards your required hours to keep that up every year.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:34  Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Ryan Bracey 00:17:34  Attending does help you. Yep.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:36  Absolutely. And there’s a lot of good information, of course. And things change on the web all the time. So just if you had ideas or heard something three years ago, it might be a little different in how we deliver things today. As we know, technology moves very quickly. So that’s a great, great thing to mention. Thank you for bringing that up. So yes, absolutely. So Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today. I am also an organizer. That’s why I failed to mention that at the beginning. I am one of the organizers on the marketing team along with June Liu. We co-organized marketing for WP Accessibility Day, which is why I kind of knew how to lead some of those questions and knew some of the answers in advance. This is my second year doing that. So, it’s a pleasure to serve with you, Ryan, on that committee. And I appreciate all the work that you put into that every year. And, yeah. And you’re wearing the t-shirt if you’re listening and you can’t and you’re not. He’s wearing last year’s organizer t shirt, or we actually sold these as well. With your registration, it says focus. It’s a feature, not a bug. WordPress Accessibility Day 2024 I am incredibly excited for this year’s t-shirt, so once it’s up, I know once it’s available and people can see it, I think we’ll be wearing them at. If you’re over at WordCamp Europe, you’ll probably be able to see us in those t-shirts on Contributor Day as well. So again, Ryan, thank you so much for spending some time with me and I look forward to seeing you. Hopefully at WordCamp Montclair coming up soon, one on one to see you over there and then also continuing to work with you on WP Accessibility Day. Thank you so much. And thank you, everybody else, for hanging in and watching us and learning more about it. And in case you missed it, in case we didn’t say it too many times, enough times 2025.WPAccessibility.Day. That’s where you can get all the information. So thank you everybody. Thank you Ryan. We’ll talk to you soon okay.

Ryan Bracey 00:19:23  Thanks for having me.