CSUN: WordPress tweetup – accessible presentations

The first session I attended at CSUN was Joseph O’Connor’s presentation on: Cities, making free accessible WordPress themes, and an announcement about a new project.

In a brief update, Joe mentioned there are now a few themes, e.g. Anna Belle Leiserson, who has done the theme The Web for All Y’all.

In LA Joe talked to a few WordPress devs at a meet-up. Someone asked “what is accessibility”, so he knew he had his work cut out. However, he met someone at Pen State who understands accessible development, and they started cooking up a scheme…

Slideshows (presentations)

Joe’s introduction to the topic was that the output from presentations are not very accessible at the moment. Joe’s is in keynote, which isn’t good for accessible output, and uploading to Slideshare won’t really help.

Paul Adams uses an approach using jQuery (example), which is accessible, and it has a certain style, but it isn’t necessarily for everyone.

Natalee MacLess is working on something: Accessible slides & output in WordPress.

Joe said that those of us working on WordPress core know things are getting better, slowly, but surely, and it would be good to take advantage of the platform for this.

Joe showed a demo of what Natalee has been working on, if he adds the video I’ll link to it later.

The demo showed several slides running from a local WordPress install. The slides can do transitions, but Joe spots a typo. In the demo, they logged into WordPress, went to the posts, and each slide is a post. You can go into each post/slide and edit it, then back to the presentation of the slides, typo corrected.

Please come to the 3:10 thursday session, the WordPress roadmap for accessibility. This will be talking about institutionalising accessibility in the WordPress organisation.

Thoughts

From my point of view, it’s an interesting idea but it didn’t appear to be something I’d use. Perhaps it is just early stages, and the approach will change. However, I wouldn’t want a post for each slide, unless I was making a WordPress install for each presentation, which isn’t very practical.

I’d prefer a static files solution, however, if collaboration and an accessible interface are key factors, then it is something to keep an eye on.