WordPress Accessibility Meetup

Automated accessibility testing tools have become essential parts of modern development workflows. While these tools are valuable for quickly identifying common accessibility issues, they only detect a portion of real-world accessibility barriers.

This session explores the critical accessibility problems that automated tools often fail to identify, including keyboard navigation issues, focus management problems, screen reader usability challenges, dynamic content announcements, and interaction patterns that require human judgment and manual testing.

Through practical examples and real-world testing scenarios, attendees will learn why a passing accessibility score does not always translate to an accessible user experience. The session will also cover effective manual testing approaches and how to combine automation with real user-focused accessibility validation.

Perfect for developers, QA engineers, designers, and accessibility professionals looking to move beyond automated audits and better understand real accessibility testing.

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You can’t learn WCAG in an hour, but you can learn how to learn WCAG in an hour.

WCAG 2.x is important because it is the standard for website accessibility (other standards like Section 508 and EN 301 549 incorporate WCAG), but it is technical, complicated, and can be challenging to learn, so many people don’t understand it as well as they need to or would like to.

In this presentation, Cam will provide foundational context about WCAG and explain how to slowly and seriously learn WCAG like a professional. We’ll touch on WCAG in Plain English resources, the official Understanding and Technique docs, learning HTML/CSS/JavaScript/ARIA, getting experience testing and auditing (perhaps including WCAG-EM), using professional forums, and getting certified.

At the end, we can briefly touch on WCAG 3, and we’ll also point out how to check the WCAG references raised in the Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker plug-in.

After the presentation, participants will be able to:

• Describe WCAG at a high level (including principles, success criteria, levels of conformance, and conformance requirements).
• Recognize the differences between normative and informative content and between official and unofficial documents.
• Identify the technical skills that underwrite WCAG and how to develop them.
• Explain how to gain experience using and interpreting WCAG and where to seek out professional guidance.

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Emails are an important part of the user experience, but they are often overlooked during accessibility testing.

Transactional emails from online shops, membership sites, contact forms, account notifications, and newsletters must be accessible so every recipient can read, understand, and act on the information they contain.

In this session, Maria Maldonado will discuss email accessibility and how it applies to emails sent from WordPress websites, including both automated transactional and marketing emails. The session will look at practical examples, including table-based email layouts, links, headings, images, color contrast, readable content structure, and testing workflows.

You will learn:

• Why email accessibility matters for WordPress websites.
• Common accessibility issues in transactional and newsletter emails.
• How to test emails sent from a website.

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Generative AI tools are flooded with promises of automated accessibility shortcuts, but fully automated, "hands-off" alt text often fails blind and low-vision users by missing context or introducing inaccuracies.

This presentation 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.

We will look at how we can design user interfaces that use benevolent friction within Gutenberg, Elementor, and the WordPress Media Library to make it completely frictionless for site administrators to write or edit alt text, while making it gently difficult to publish empty image descriptions.

Additionally, we'll discuss how AI shouldn't just do the work for lazy administrators, but should act as an accessibility training tool—using multi-subject angles and screen-reader context boxes to teach content creators how to draft high-quality visual descriptions on their own over time.

Attendees will walk away from this presentation with a clear understanding of:

1. The Human-in-the-Loop Imperative: Why fully automated AI accessibility overlays and silent background scripts fail, and how to build software that enforces human review, human editing, and final content ownership.
2. The Mechanics of Benevolent Friction: How to identify key intercept points in the WordPress admin interface (such as save hooks, post-publishing routines, and page exits) to guide users toward accessible habits naturally.
3. Repurposing UI for Accessibility Training: Practical examples of how providing contextual feedback—like multi-subject variations and immediate screen-reader character constraints—can improve the user's real-world understanding of digital accessibility standards.

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