In June, Joe Dolson (@joedolson) and Rian Rietveld (@rianrietveld) started the project to update and extend documentation for WordPress about accessibility. We now abbreviate the project as “WP A11y Docs”.
This update informs you about:
- how the documentation will be set up;
- the work we did up to now;
- what we are going to do next;
- how you can help.
Setup of the documentation
The last month we talked with many people in and outside the WP community about the best way to share a11y (accessibility) knowledge in a sustainable way. We came to the following setup.
Phase 1
In a dedicated website WP Accessibility Knowledge Base we gather all information about accessibility for people that use or build for WordPress. In this site we add content and figure out what the best way is to provide the WP community with the best a11y info.
The current Accessibility Handbook will be renamed Accessibility Team Handbook.
And will contain only information about the team itself, how to contribute and when the meetings are (etc). The information about accessibility itself moves to the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base.
Phase 2
On developers.wordpress.org a new section will be created, the Accessibility Handbook where the info for developers and designers will be added, taken from WP Accessibility Knowledge Base. This section will live as a repo on the WordPress GitHub account.
The setup of using first a dedicated website to write and to find out the best way to organise content and later add relevant content to the developers handbook, is discussed in the Documentation Team Slack channel. Thank you Jon (@kenshino) and Milana (@milana_cap) for your feedback.
Work in July and August ’25
We created a website for the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base. The website is build in Jekyll using GitHub pages which makes it easy for contributors to add content in markdown as open source project.
The related Github repo is wp-a11y-docs.
Note: at the moment the content contains only placeholder text, from August 11 on we are going to fill that site with real content.
What’s next?
On August 20, Rian will host a brainstorm afternoon about which content we need to provide for the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base and which content is useful for developers.wordpress.org. And also about how to organise the content in a way people can easily find what they need. This will be with people from the Dutch WordPress community and Accessibility community.
After that session Rian will create issues on GitHub for everyone that wants to help to pick up.
How you can help?
Pick an issue from the wp-a11y-docs/issues! After August 21 there wil be many to choose from.
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