Tag Archives: Accessible Zen

Remembering Accessible Joe

In life, you often need someone to give you a nudge.

That nudge can come in many forms. A word of encouragement that ups your confidence. A long, heartfelt chat that makes you pause, think and change direction. Or an idea you can take on as your own. That’s just to name a few.

A few days ago, I heard that Joseph O’Connor, a well-respected accessibility advocate, died after a long battle with chronic illness. You can read more about Joe in the announcement on his website, and in a nice round-up from Dennis Lembree. Deborah Edwards-Onoro also has a lovely goodbye on her blog. Mike Gifford created a well-deserved Wikipedia page for Joe.

Hearing this news made me deeply sad. Joe helped my career in a way I’m not sure he realized, so I wanted to that share here.

I connected with Joe as a member of the WordPress Accessibility team — how I started contributing to WordPress. Along with Joe, Joe Dolson, Rian Rietveld and Graham Armfield, welcomed my contributions and gave me a home where I felt useful and valued. Joe and I worked together the most on his Cities initiative, which aimed to increase the number of accessibility-ready WordPress themes. I decided to design and build a theme representing Washington D.C. It didn’t quite work out that way though.

I had wanted to create and release a public WordPress theme for awhile. But I stopped short of creating one because I didn’t know how it would be different than everything already out there. Joe’s Cities idea gave me the “nudge” I needed. Accessibility would be the difference in what I made!

As I mentioned, things didn’t go exactly to plan. Once I started brainstorming design ideas, I got more excited about making a minimalistic design, inspired by Zen Habits. Accessible Zen was born, and I released it in June, 2013. I needed that nudge, even if what I made didn’t fit into Joe’s vision. I still learned a ton, and put something accessible out into the world.

Releasing the theme also gave me the confidence to apply to speak at my first WordCamp. The organizers accepted my talk about Accessible Zen, and I delivered it in early 2014. Shortly after, I began a trial at Automattic to work on its Theme Team. I landed that gig, and it shaped my career in countless ways.

All thanks to a nudge from “Accessible” Joe O’Connor. Someone I admired who took the time to share his big idea, and his expertise. Thank you, Joe. I won’t forget what you did and I’ll miss your voice in our community.

Accessible Zen: Version 1.2

I just released version 1.2 of Accessible Zen. It’s the first update in a year, and features some bug fixes and improvements. The biggest improvement includes the use of WordPress.org language packs.

Grab the theme in the official theme directory.

For full details, see the changelog below:

May 5, 2016 Release: Version 1.2

Happy blogging!

You and the Future of WordPress Themes

Road that curves into horizon

I have a confession.

When I created Accessible Zen, I wanted it to be downloaded and used by thousands. I thought since it would be one of the first accessibility-ready WordPress themes in the directory, it had a chance to become something special.

That turned out to be a selfish viewpoint though. Why? When you release open source code, you quickly learn that you alone have little control over what comes after the initial release. You never know how people will use your creation, and what will come of it as a result. I see it as a form of collaboration. It’s not about you and your ideas, but the community and its ideas.

I got much more pleasure out of getting a simple thank you for releasing the theme, or seeing someone use it for an amazing cause than anything else. At those moments, the number of downloads don’t matter. Neither does what was used to build it or whether it employs the latest design trends. What matters most is that someone took something I made, and created something even better with it. Like I said, collaboration.

That brings me to you and the future of themes. In a recent comment on a WordPress Tavern post, my colleague Ian Stewart, said:

It often feels like there are missing pieces in the WordPress experience outside themes themselves. Much like I wish more people released design ideas for future default themes it’d be great to see more people push forward on ideas and solutions that could benefit every theme and every user.

We often start building themes, plugins and side projects for ourselves and our own benefit. We forget that the real magic happens not because of how we create or why we create our projects, but in the simple act of sharing our ideas. Because then, someone else can take those ideas and build on them.

So as we think about the future of themes, we, not just you play a very big part in it. It matters less about the twists and turns we take to get somewhere new and exciting, and more that we go around those corners together. Have you collaborated with anyone in the WordPress community lately?

Image courtesy of Pexels.com.

Accessible Zen: Version 1.1.5

I just released an update to Accessible Zen, the first one in almost a year! It’s been too long, something I hope doesn’t happen again. Release, release, release, as they say.

Big thanks to Lutz Donnerhacke for the German translation added in this update. Speaking of translations, that’s why I took so long to release this version. I tried to wait for translators to update files, based on the recent changes. But translators do their work out of the goodness of their hearts (Thank you!), and they didn’t have the time to verify that the packaged translations work perfectly. So I just released. 🙂 If you speak French or German, you could help out Accessible Zen in a big way. Take the translation files for a spin and update them. Send them my way, and I’ll release an update. The changelog is below for 1.1.4 and 1.1.5.

Grab the theme in the official theme directory.

April 12, 2015 Release: Version 1.1.5

Is This Venue Accessible?

 Sean Gray, co-owner, Fan Death Records and Accidental Guest Records, has created a site called “Is This Venue Accessible?” to track the accessibility of music venues. He’s been featured in Pitchfork, The Kojo Nnamdi Show, Vice, Village Voice and more.

Jake Reid helped Sean build the site with Accessible Zen. I’m so excited to see Accessible Zen used for something like this.

Accessible Zen on ProfHacker

George Williams of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker blog featured Accessible Zen and other accessible WordPress themes in a post called, “Accessibility Ready” WordPress Themes.

The post is from February but I didn’t run across it until today thanks to Twitter. It’s great to see accessibility in WordPress getting some attention outside of the usual WordPress circle.

Lessons from Building an Accessible WordPress Theme

This post is a summary of a talk I gave at WordCamp Lancaster in March, 2014.

A phone call that lasted less than five minutes started my obsession with accessibility.

Dave, Meet Accessibility

During my first few weeks on the job at The Arc as Online Communication Manager, I spoke with one of our board members who told me he was having trouble using our newly redesigned website. He liked the new one much better than the old one, he said, but still struggled with a few key areas on the site. He rattled them off as I scribbled on a notepad.

After we hung up the phone and I digested the conversation, I realized I only knew how to fix one of the handful of items that he listed off to me. He was blind and used a screen reader to navigate the web. I’d never used one, but knew I had to learn so I could build a better experience for not just him, but anyone who came to our sites. I followed Jeffrey Zeldman, the father of web standards, and understood the very basics of accessibility, but didn’t really know how challenging and rewarding web accessibility could be. I dug in. (Need to know more about what accessibility is? Read WebAIM’s introduction.)

WordPress + Accessibility

A few years later, I wanted to give back to the web and WordPress. I honed so much of my front end development and accessibility skills off of opening up WordPress themes to see how they worked. So it made sense to build my own theme and release it under the GPL, like WordPress. How would I make my theme unique among the many already out there? I would bake accessibility in from the start, of course! And I would learn a lot along the way.

Accessible Zen

I released Accessible Zen in the fall of 2013 as a simple, accessible WordPress theme modeled after the themes I’ve admired on Zen Habits, built especially for personal bloggers. It proved to be a ton of hard work, but worth it. Here’s what I learned during the process:

Keep Your Goal in Mind

I set out to build a simple, accessible WordPress theme, but it turns out that’s hard when the web world keeps changing and tossing out new ideas at you every day. A theme design could go in a trillion directions. The one way that kept me on track was just opening up zenhabits.net in a browser once a week to bask in its simplicity. It served as a visual reminder.

Lesson: If you love your goal, stick with it.

Good Accessibility is Undetectable

Why is accessibility hard? The answers to web accessibility challenges and problems aren’t always clear. So much of the right approach often depends on the context of the website or web application in question. Plus, you can’t really see accessibility, like a design or content – whether it’s done well or not. Accessible Zen is built on the back of Underscores. The underlying code isn’t much different and when I look at Accessible Zen, I can’t see what makes it accessible.

Lesson: Love your starter theme of choice and use it.

 Small Details Make a Big Difference

In accessibility, details matter. When creating Accessible Zen, I focused a lot of attention on things like color contrast, skip nav links, default link styling and read more links. All these small things helped make the theme much more accessible.

Lesson: Small stuff needs love too.

Recognize What You’re Doing

You’re making something!

I spent countless hours crafting the design and code for Accessible Zen. I wasn’t sure if anyone would like it, download it or use it. But shortly after I released one of the beta versions, I saw this tweet from Shane Jackson:

I could have stopped right there and the theme would have succeeded in my mind.

Lesson: Find someone who loves your work.

Today, Accessible Zen has been downloaded a few thousand times and is used by my friends and even a company made of up of assistive technology professionals who are blind. Not bad for something born out of a five-minute phone call.

If you’re interested in making WordPress more accessible, join the WordPress Accessibility team.

Accessible Zen: Now in French

Accessible Zen now comes packaged with a French translation, plus starter files in English to get new translations going easier. Thanks to Brieuc Segalen for contributing the translation!

The changelog is below.

Grab the theme in the official theme directory.

July 1, 2014

Release: Version 1.1.3