What Everyone Should Know About The Gutenberg Accessibility Situation?

Gutenberg is the brand new editor of WordPress that is going to be very useful for WordPress users. So far, it has received very mixed reactions from the WordPress community and those reactions have become increasingly negative since a hard deadline was set for the release of WordPress 5.0. This is the situation even though many people have considered it to be incomplete. However a hard release deadline for software is usually fine but there is some other issue with this particular software. The question is what will be the main editor for WordPress that powers about 35% of the websites still isn’t fully accessible. This issue has been raised by the WordPress community many times and the officials at “Automattic” brush it very nicely under the carpet - at least as it seems. It may sound like a messy situation to you so, I will discuss what has happened and how such situations can be avoided in the future in this article.

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About WordPress

 

For those amongst us who don’t know much about WordPress, I will give you a bit of context here while rest can skip this part of the article and directly start reading about the Gutenberg.

The millions of websites that are operating on the internet, of those around 35% of websites are powered by Wordpress with the open-source CMS and the wordpress hosted blogs. Although WordPress is an open-source platform but it is heavily contributed by Automattic that runs WordPress along with other products. It also makes a lot of decisions associated with WordPress including the new editor named Gutenberg.

 

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What happened to Gutenberg?

 

There have been certain accessibility issues with the Gutenberg plugin as long as it was available to install. One could easily notice that it has a tonne of issues with the basics such as focus management and others. However it was expected that the issues would be fixed very soon but it didn’t. There were two reasons that have worsened the situation, firstly its accessibility lead resigned in October and then “Automattic” set a hard deadline for the release of WordPress 5.0 without even thinking that accessibility issues were not fixed yet.

 

Now let me tell you what happens when a big company like Automattic decides to prioritize a deadline without fixing the accessibility issues. They force people indirectly to use the editor with impairments and that is absolutely shocking.

What’s even more shocking is that they send out a message explaining that compliance is not as important as the new flashy features in the plugin. Later, a crowdfunding campaign was started to get an accessibility audit done on Gutenberg as Automattic was not ready to pay for it. They were just sitting back and waiting for the funds to be raised through crowdfunding. Finally on 29th November Automattic’s CEO has committed to fund the accessibility audit for Gutenberg.

 

As you already know that WordPress is a popular platform for professional designers and developers to build a website, you can also take its advantage if you want to create and maintain your website yourself. To do this you need to have a good amount of knowledge of programming languages such as HTML and CSS else you can hire an experienced designer to create a WordPress website.

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How To Avoid This Mess?

 

Apart from the accessibility issues that occurred in the Gutenberg plugin, I think that the design process was mostly at fault. A lot of issues were based around the complexity such as creative blocks, and editing the content was difficult for visually impaired people and the keyboard users. Perhaps if accessibility issues would have been considered at the starting of the project, the process of creating, editing, and moving blocks would be a lot simpler and it would not appear to be a cognitive overload (excessively used amount of working memory resources).

But the problem now is that accessibility is not a core feature of the Gutenberg and it needs to be fixed. Although the cognitive issues have been improved a lot, it will continue to exist.

 

Another thing that could have been done in a different way is to provide help and training to developers on the JS-heavy codebase. A lot of accessibility fixing work was looking very difficult as the accessibility team of Gutenberg had no React developers. At that point of time, it would be a great decision to help people who contribute to WordPress for free to learn JavaScript so that they could have been involved quite earlier in the process. While it is true that Gutenebrg can’t be recognized as truly empowering if it prevents a large number of users from managing the content, however in some cases it was doing its job too.

 

If a responsible CEO would have been in this position, he would have probably written an incredibly apologetic statement but this was not the case with Automattic’s CEO.

Additionally, they would probably postpone the hard deadline set for the release of their products until all accessibility issues were fixed. But at the very least they would not force the WordPress users to use their new editor.

 

Although Gutenberg plugin in Wordpress has accessibility issues but keep in mind that having a WordPress website for your company or business would prove to be an upper hand. This is because WordPress websites come with a lot of advantages such as it is adaptable for changing needs, ranks high in the search engine results and are also mobile responsive. At our web design company in Los Angeles, we offer professional web design services with a competitive SEO strategy. This way we ensure that your website ranks for highly competitive and most searched keywords that are relevant to your business.

Wrapping Up

 

Well it is pretty obvious that a company can’t be operated by just one or two people and there are also a lot of incredible people working at Automattic and within the WordPress core team. I know these people will improve the situation and fix every issue that is troubling the WordPress users. I also hope that they will learn the lessons and make sure that this mess won’t happen again. However this situation is no less than a warning and you can’t ignore the accessibility issues with Gutenberg plugin. You should study it well and integrate it into the entire process of your projects like it’s a priority not an option.

 

Lastly I would say that if you don’t have a WordPress website for your business, you should consider having one as it is flexible to changing needs of every business. If you assign our Wordpress website design company to create a WordPress website for you, we guarantee to increase your website traffic within a month.

Whether you want your visitors to sign up for your newsletters or make them purchase your product, we will ensure that every visitor takes some action on visiting your site. It’s because customer satisfaction is our priority and we want to build a great relationship with our customers.

 

Contact Details:

 

213-277-9177

la@sfwpexperts.com

Wordpress Developer

 

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What Everyone Should Know About The Gutenberg Accessibility Situation?

By mikedavistech

What Everyone Should Know About The Gutenberg Accessibility Situation?

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