What Everyone Should Know About The Gutenberg Accessibility Situation?

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What Everyone Should Know About The Gutenberg
Accessibility Situation?
Gutenberg is the brand new editor of WordPress
that is going to be very useful for WordPress
users. So far, it has received very mixed
reactions from the WordPress community and those
reactions have become increasingly negative
since a hard deadline was set for the release of
WordPress 5.0. This is the situation even though
many people have considered it to be incomplete.
However a hard release deadline for software is
usually fine but there is some other issue with
this particular software. The question is what
will be the main editor for WordPress that
powers about 35 of the websites still isnt
fully accessible. This issue has been raised by
the WordPress community many times and the
officials at Automattic brush it very nicely
under the carpet - at least as it seems. It
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may sound like a messy situation to you so, I
will discuss what has happened and how such
situations can be avoided in the future in this
article. At first look at the top web design Los
Angeles company, SFWPExperts that creates
excellent WordPress websites for clients around
the world at 30 less price than other agencies.
Our ability to customize every aspect of your
website according to your unique needs is
absolutely remarkable. In addition to this you
can also contact us for other services like
responsive website design, WordPress plugin
development, and SEO that will help in
attracting your target customers and make them
purchase from your site regularly. About
WordPress For those amongst us who dont know
much about WordPress, I will give you a bit of
context here while rest can skip this part of the
article and directly start reading about the
Gutenberg. The millions of websites that are
operating on the internet, of those around 35
of websites are powered by Wordpress with the
open-source CMS and the wordpress hosted blogs.
Although WordPress is an open-source platform
but it is heavily contributed by Automattic that
runs WordPress along with other products. It
also makes a lot of decisions associated with
WordPress including the new editor named
Gutenberg. Since some of the websites running on
the internet are powered by WordPress, you might
be considering creating one for your startup,
enterprise or other businesses. The advantage of
having a WordPress website is that it has its
own content management system through which you
can make changes to your website or edit
something without hiring a designer. When you
partner with our Los Angeles web design company
you can be sure that we will help you in
achieving your conversion goal no matter how
hard it is for other companies. What happened to
Gutenberg?
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There have been certain accessibility issues with
the Gutenberg plugin as long as it was available
to install. One could easily notice that it has a
tonne of issues with the basics such as focus
management and others. However it was expected
that the issues would be fixed very soon but it
didnt. There were two reasons that have
worsened the situation, firstly its accessibility
lead resigned in October and then Automattic
set a hard deadline for the release of WordPress
5.0 without even thinking that accessibility
issues were not fixed yet. Now let me tell you
what happens when a big company like Automattic
decides to prioritize a deadline without fixing
the accessibility issues. They force people
indirectly to use the editor with impairments and
that is absolutely shocking. Whats even more
shocking is that they send out a message
explaining that compliance is not as important as
the new flashy features in the plugin. Later, a
crowdfunding campaign was started to get an
accessibility audit done on Gutenberg as
Automattic was not ready to pay for it. They
were just sitting back and waiting for the funds
to be raised through crowdfunding. Finally on
29th November Automattics CEO has committed to
fund the accessibility audit for Gutenberg. As
you already know that WordPress is a popular
platform for professional designers and
developers to build a website, you can also take
its advantage if you want to create and maintain
your website yourself. To do this you need to
have a good amount of knowledge of programming
languages such as HTML and CSS else you can hire
an experienced designer to create a WordPress
website. Our web design company in Los Angeles
has an award-winning team of designers and
developers who are very creative and innovative
when it comes to web design and development.
With our professional web design services, your
business can deliver the best user experience
while increasing the user engagement at the same
time. How To Avoid This Mess? Apart from the
accessibility issues that occurred in the
Gutenberg plugin, I think that the design
process was mostly at fault. A lot of issues were
based around the complexity such as creative
blocks, and editing the content was difficult
for visually impaired people and the keyboard
users.
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Perhaps if accessibility issues would have been
considered at the starting of the project, the
process of creating, editing, and moving blocks
would be a lot simpler and it would not appear
to be a cognitive overload (excessively used
amount of working memory resources). But the
problem now is that accessibility is not a core
feature of the Gutenberg and it needs to be
fixed. Although the cognitive issues have been
improved a lot, it will continue to
exist. Another thing that could have been done
in a different way is to provide help and
training to developers on the JS-heavy codebase.
A lot of accessibility fixing work was looking
very difficult as the accessibility team of
Gutenberg had no React developers. At that point
of time, it would be a great decision to help
people who contribute to WordPress for free to
learn JavaScript so that they could have been
involved quite earlier in the process. While it
is true that Gutenebrg cant be recognized as
truly empowering if it prevents a large number
of users from managing the content, however in
some cases it was doing its job too. If a
responsible CEO would have been in this position,
he would have probably written an incredibly
apologetic statement but this was not the case
with Automattics CEO. Additionally, they would
probably postpone the hard deadline set for the
release of their products until all accessibility
issues were fixed. But at the very least they
would not force the WordPress users to use their
new editor. Although Gutenberg plugin in
Wordpress has accessibility issues but keep in
mind that having a WordPress website for your
company or business would prove to be an upper
hand. This is because WordPress websites come
with a lot of advantages such as it is adaptable
for changing needs, ranks high in the search
engine results and are also mobile responsive. At
our web design company in Los Angeles, we offer
professional web design services with a
competitive SEO strategy. This way we ensure that
your website ranks for highly competitive and
most searched keywords that are relevant to your
business. Wrapping Up
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Well it is pretty obvious that a company cant be
operated by just one or two people and there are
also a lot of incredible people working at
Automattic and within the WordPress core team. I
know these people will improve the situation and
fix every issue that is troubling the WordPress
users. I also hope that they will learn the
lessons and make sure that this mess wont
happen again. However this situation is no less
than a warning and you cant ignore the
accessibility issues with Gutenberg plugin. You
should study it well and integrate it into the
entire process of your projects like its a
priority not an option. Lastly I would say that
if you dont have a WordPress website for your
business, you should consider having one as it is
flexible to changing needs of every business. If
you assign our Wordpress website design c ompany
to create a WordPress website for you, we
guarantee to increase your website traffic
within a month. Whether you want your visitors to
sign up for your newsletters or make them
purchase your product, we will ensure that every
visitor takes some action on visiting your site.
Its because customer satisfaction is our
priority and we want to build a great
relationship with our customers. Contact
Details 213-277-9177 l a_at_sfwpexperts.com W
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