After attending Word Camp US #wcus this past weekend via remote and listening to many of the talks given by quite a few knowledgeable and experienced presenters, I decided to dive in and take a look at the Gutenberg interface.

Starting with an install of WordPress that is setup locally with desktop server, I disabled all the plugins, and then installed and activated the twenty twenty theme that my girl-friend downloaded for me.

Once I activated the theme, I took a quick tour of the home page of my development/experimentation site and found that their are quite a few issues with utilizing a screen reader. #a11y

Several of the links on the page are being run together as if there are no spaces between words. For example, the Skip to the content link was being spoken as if it were written this way “Skiptothecontent.” Also, The links for commenting on a post were being spoken in the same manner.

Next I also found that the information for a post was being spoken similarly. For example, Post Author was being spoken such as “postauthor,” and is the same with the Post Date.

I have spent approximately 17 hours over the last few days going through several files in the theme to familiarize myself with the code, starting with the style.css file; and yes, I read through all 5902 lines in the file.

My next adventure is to start going through the functions.php file, and then the templates along with all template parts.

Being a screen reader user, I find it very disturbing that more attention has not been given to accessibility #a11y. Just a thought; it would have been much easier and simpler to design and develop for accessibility before starting to code this project. It will be much more difficult to implement accessibility after the fact. Who made the decision to move forward with a project this large without accessibility from the ground up? In my opinion this is the most ridiculously moronic decision I’ve ever encountered!