Accessibility Craft

What does it take to make 41 WooCommerce extensions more accessible? James Kemp, Core Product Manager at WooCommerce, joins Amber Hinds and Steve Jones to discuss the work behind 41 Accessibility Conformance Reports, from getting buy-in and prioritizing plugins to coordinating fixes across development teams. They explore how the European Accessibility Act helped motivate the project, why older plugins can hide unexpected issues, and how public reports help merchants make informed choices. First, they toast the project with Thomson & Scott Noughty Non Alcoholic Sparkling Chardonnay, with a cautious cork opening and mixed reviews. In this episode: Why WooCommerce invested in accessibility and how the team secured buy-in. Prioritizing extensions by active users, customer impact, and front-end functionality. Coordinating WooCommerce, Fueled, and audit teams through Linear, GitHub, and Slack. Handling third-party payment issues and legacy code in Product Vendors. Catching accessibility issues earlier in development. Publishing useful conformance reports and making the report tables accessible. What could come next for accessibility in the WooCommerce admin. For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/188. Chapters (00:00:00) - Welcome to Accessibility Craft(00:00:40) - Introducing Guest (James Kemp)(00:02:48) - Today's Beverage(00:12:18) - Why WooCommerce Invested in Accessibility(00:17:42) - Prioritizing 41 Extensions(00:22:59) - Brought to you by Accessibility Checker(00:24:13) - Coordinating Accessibility Fixes Across Teams(00:30:39) - Unexpected Issues and Lessons from Older Plugins(00:35:09) - Catching Accessibility Issues Earlier(00:36:44) - Accessibility Conformance Reports(00:41:37) - Building Accessible Report Tables(00:43:23) - What's Next for WooCommerce Accessibility(00:45:12) - Where to Find James and Closing Thoughts(00:45:53) - Outro

This episode is a recording of an October 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this meetup, Courtney Robertson shared a practical case study of running Equalize Digital’s Accessibility Checker Pro across her long-running WordPress site (including a large archive of older posts), then feeding those scan results into Claude Code to automate fixes. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month. For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/187.

Is there such a thing as practical accessibility magic? Inspired by October, Practical Magic, and a “Lime in the Coconut” Milkshake Sour DIPA from Blue Owl Brewing, Amber, Chris, and Steve open their "spellbooks" and dive in... They’re looking for the changes that can make a real difference to a website's accessibility conformance. Speaking of conformance levels, the conversation begins with the latest WCAG 3 draft. What might replace the familiar A, AA, and AAA conformance levels? How could reporting change? Listen, or read, to find out. Then, our hosts put accessibility overlays under the “spell or curse?” test. The conversation draws on recent overlay research, accessibility guidance, and lawsuit data, but it also makes room for the people who installed a widget because they genuinely thought it would help. And it isn't all about overlays, we talk about 5+ fixes that you can start implementing right now that are so impactful, the usability improvements can feel a bit like practical magic. Finally, the team discusses AI-assisted captions, translations, accessibility testing, and development, because these days what conversation is complete without a mini AI-related side tangent? For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/186. Chapters (00:00:00) - Introduction(00:01:24) - Today's Beverage(00:08:53) - WCAG 3 Latest Draft: Our Reactions(00:18:18) - Practical Accessibility Magic Overview(00:18:49) - Brought to you by Accessibility Checker(00:20:03) - Spell, or Curse? We Talk About Overlays!(00:28:19) - Better Ingredients for Your "Magic" Accessibility Potions(00:33:06) - Can AI Help Us Cast Our Accessibility "Spells" Faster, Better?

This episode is a recording of an October 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this presentation, Deneb Pulsipher uses a real-world case study—the open-source plugin Polly Alt—to explore how we can ethically leverage generative AI as an accessibility aid by intentionally keeping a human in the loop. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that takes place via Zoom webinars twice a month. For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/185.

What does it actually take to design a modern, accessible website from the ground up? In this episode of Accessibility Craft, we’re pulling back the curtain on the Equalize Digital website redesign. We talk about how we selected a design partner, why our original design budget nearly doubled, and how accessibility requirements were built into the process before the first Figma designs ever arrived. We also dig into accessibility QA during the design phase, and Steve shares some early thoughts on how the designs will become a modular, performant WordPress build. Before all that, we preview WordPress Accessibility Day 2026 and taste Spindrift Tea in Blood Orange, a still brewed iced tea with real fruit juice that inspires some surprisingly strong opinions. For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/184. Chapters (00:00:00) - Introduction(00:02:05) - Today’s Beverage: Spindrift Blood Orange Tea(00:08:31) - WordPress Accessibility Day 2026(00:13:15) - Our Website Redesign Update(00:13:39) - Sponsor: Accessibility Checker(00:14:46) - Choosing a Design Partner With Accessibility in Mind(00:19:38) - The Design Budget: Before and After(00:21:43) - Documenting Accessibility Requirements(00:28:34) - Reviewing Designs for Accessibility(00:35:28) - Accessible Designs Aren’t Boring!

This episode is a recording of a September 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this presentation, Maria Maldonado discussed email accessibility and looked at practical examples, including table-based email layouts, links, headings, images, color contrast, readable content structure, and testing workflows. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month. For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/183.

WordPress Accessibility Day 2026 is coming October 7–8, and this episode takes you behind the scenes of how its speakers, sessions, and keynote came together. Ryan Bracey, Director of Web Development and User Experience at Second Melody and Speaker Team Lead for WordPress Accessibility Day, joins Amber and Chris to talk about the hidden work that goes into reviewing 88 speaker submissions, anonymizing proposals to reduce bias, building a diverse schedule, and balancing technical, business, design, and lived-experience perspectives. Ryan also previews some of the sessions he is most excited about, including this year’s keynote from GitHub Head of Accessibility Ed Summers. And everyone previews what excites them personally, with a wide range of upcoming talks covering AI, accessible development workflows, WooCommerce onboarding, remediation pushback, and accessibility ownership after launch. For the craft portion of Accessibility Craft, the group gets into the fall spirit with a Vienna-style lager from Austin’s Fast Friends Beer Company. The beer earns a rare unanimous two-thumbs-up and sparks a surprisingly nostalgic conversation about Oktoberfest, bonfires, beach cookouts, and questionable college beer choices. For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/182. Chapters (00:00:00) - Introduction(00:01:40) - Meet Ryan Bracey(00:04:50) - Craft Beverage Pick(00:08:26) - Fall Vibes and Tasting Notes(00:13:27) - Ratings and Conference Tease(00:14:11) - WordPress Accessibility Day Overview(00:15:10) - Sponsor Break(00:16:24) - Speaker Selection Process(00:19:15) - Anonymized Reviews and Fairness(00:22:03) - Diversity Stats Snapshot(00:23:07) - Diversity by Merit(00:26:05) - Balancing Talk Ratings(00:27:21) - Perfect Score Spotlight(00:31:21) - Keynote: Ed Summers(00:37:21) - Schedule Picks Roundup(00:43:06) - Team Talks Shoutout(00:45:41) - Where to Find Ryan(00:47:51) - Register and Support(00:48:41) - Podcast Wrap and Credits

This episode is a recording of a September 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this presentation, Cam will provide foundational context about WCAG and explain how to slowly and seriously learn WCAG like a professional. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month. For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/181.

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

This episode is a recording of an August 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this session, Tanveer Khan explored critical accessibility problems that automated tools often miss, including keyboard navigation issues, focus management problems, screen reader usability challenges, dynamic content announcements, and interaction patterns that require human judgment and manual testing. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month. For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/179.