WPCampus released the results of the much-awaited Gutenberg accessibility audit. Tenon LLC conducted the tests and produced the report at the cost of $31,200. On top of donations raised by WPCampus, Automattic covered about two-thirds of that total.
The testing was done using WordPress 5.0.3, and the report acknowledges that several accessibility issues have been addressed in subsequent releases. However, the 329-page long-form technical report — along with the 34-page executive summary — clearly concludes that “Gutenberg has significant and pervasive accessibility problems, the likes of which amount to a step backwards for users with disabilities over the legacy editor.” 😞
Rachel Cherry, director of WPCampus and one of the original proponents of the audit, shared some helpful responses to the report on Twitter over the past weekend and called for constructive engagement: “If you’d like to help remediate these issues, I recommend joining the WordPress design, core, core-editor, and, of course, the accessibility team.”
The positive effects of Tenon’s audit are already being felt, and meaningful discussion of the findings began, only hours after its release, in several official WordPress Slack channels. Tickets based on issues noted in the report have already been created, and of some of them have been resolved. 🎫
A free webinar to discuss the audit results will take place Monday, May 13, 2019, at noon CDT. There’s no cost to attend, but you must register. 🖥️
If you are interested in accessibility with other CMS platforms, Accessibility Talks had a lively discussion that included Rachel Cherry among the speakers. One topic they deliberated is how accessibility is impacted by taking a traditional versus headless approach.
Finally, there’s a new desktop app called Koa11y that anyone can use to discover accessibility problems in web pages. Check it out on GitHub. It looks impressive. 👍
