All About Accessibility Lab with Joe and Anne | Save the World Brewing TX Cerveza

Special guests Joe Dolson, WordPress core committer and accessibility consultant, and Anne McCarthy, Architecture and Open Source Director at Automattic, join Amber and Steve to talk through the vision behind Accessibility Lab, a new canonical accessibility plugin concept for WordPress core.

We learn what Accessibility Lab is, what it is not, and try to understand what the practical use case is in the dizzying context of one of the world's largest open source projects.

The conversation gets into some genuinely difficult technical territory, including why some accessibility optimizations in WordPress core are particularly difficult to solve, challenges related to getting enough real-world testing, and the organizational hurdles around collecting bulk data that's detailed enough to shape decisions. There is also healthy disagreement about whether a single canonical plugin can successfully juggle both persistent, stable features and early-stage experiments that in some cases may jeopardize the stability of production WordPress websites.

And because this is Accessibility Craft, the group tackles all of that over Cerveza, a Mexican-style lager from Save The World Brewing Company in Marble Falls, Texas.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/180.

Chapters

• (00:00:00) - Introduction
• (00:00:41) - Introducing Special Guests Joe Dolson and Anne McCarthy
• (00:02:11) - Today's Beverage
• (00:10:26) - What is the Accessibility Lab plugin?
• (00:13:09) - Brought to you by Accessibility Checker
• (00:14:23) - Why create this? How did we get here?
• (00:18:19) - Anne and Joe Share Their Visions for Accessibility Lab
• (00:24:29) - Can persistent, helpful features coexist with experimental features that could break some WordPress configurations?
• (00:35:53) - The Technical and Organizational Challenges Behind Data Collection
• (00:38:40) - What is the Accessibility Lab not going to do? Where is the line?
• (00:45:14) - What belongs in Core versus Accessibility Lab?
• (00:47:56) - Does Accessibility Lab belong on live sites? Opinions are divided.
• (00:57:10) - How to Help Shape Accessibility Lab