Site owners are looking for accessible WordPress themes. There is a spectacular lack of accessible WordPress themes. A world-wide group of accessibility practitioners are creating free accessible WordPress themes.

1. Cities
Making Free Accessible
WordPress Themes

2. Cities
There are 1,747 themes in the
WordPress Theme Directoy,
four of them are accessible.

3. Cities
Cities directed by
Joseph Karr O’Connor
accessiblejoe.com

4. Agenda
What is Cities?
Accessibility
WP Accessibility
Accessibility Plugins
Accessibility Widgets
WP Accessibility Group
Accessible Content

5. Cities: Los Angeles
Theme project managed by
Natalie MacLees

6. What is Cities?
Site owners are looking for
accessible WordPress themes.
There is a spectacular lack of
accessible WordPress themes.
A world-wide group of accessibility
pactitioners are creating free
accessible WordPress themes.

7. Cities: Mumbai
Shilpi Kapoor @Shilpi_Kapoor of
BarrierBreak is developing the
Mumbai theme.

8. Accessibility
“Accessibility is the degree to which
a product, device, sevice, or
environment is available to as many
people as possible.” Cynthia Waddell

9. Accessibility
Cities themes standards:
Section 508 Compliant
WCAG 2.0 Level AA Compliant
HTML5
W3C Validation

10. Cities: Canbera
Government theme By Simon Pascal
Klein @klepas a freelance web
designer with a passion for good
typogaphy.

11. Accessibility
Constructing a POUR website:
•Perceivable
•Opeable
•Understandable
•Robust

12. Cities: Copenhagen
by Karen Mardhal @kmdk driven by
the idea of inclusion and universal
design - we're all in this together!

13. Accessibility
•Enable skip links
•Alternate text for pictures
•Captioning for video/audio
•Don’t use color for navigation
•Reading order is correct
•Data tables and forms properly coded
•Avoid timeouts in forms

14. Accessibility
•No-script elements for scripts
•Keyboard navigable
•Applications don’t override AT
•Visual focus indicator
•Don’t override user agent controls
•Sufficient color contast
•No quick motion

15. Cities: Sydney
Theme by Lisa Herrod @scenariogirl
will be a business theme.

16. WP Accessibility
WordPress accessibility group –
dedicated to improving accessibility
in core.
Join at Make WordPress Accessible.
Tweeting at @WPAccessibility.

17. Cities: D.C.
Team managed by David Kennedy
@DavidAKennedy - theme for non-
profits and government.

18. WP Accessibility
WordPress theme review guidelines
for accessibility are in daft mode.
Internet relay chat, Wednesdays,
20:00 UTC, #wordpress-ui, sever
irc.freenode.net or via freenode web
chat.

19. Cities: Toronto
Theme project managed
by Jennison Asuncion @Jennison

20. Accessibility Plugins
WP Accessibility by Joe Dolson
•Remove redundant title attributes from
page lists, categoy lists, and archive
menus.
•Enable skip links with WebKit suppot by
enqueuing JavaScript suppot for moving
keyboard focus.
•Add skip links with user-defined targets.
(Customizable targets and appeaance.)

21. Accessibility Plugins
WP Accessibility
•Add language and text direction
attributes to your HTML attribute
•Remove the target attribute from links.
•Force a search page error when a search
is made with an empty text string. (If your
theme has a search.php template.)
•Remove tabindex from elements that are
focusable.

22. Cities: Nashville
Theme by Anna Belle Leiserson
for congregations (churches,
temples, mosques etc.)

23. Accessibility Plugins
WP Accessibility
•Strip title attributes from images inseted
into content.
•Add post titles to standard "read more"
links.
•Add an outline to the keyboard focus state
for focusable elements.

24. Accessibility Plugins
WP Accessibility
•Add a toolbar toggling between high
contast, large print, and desatuated
(gayscale) views of your theme.
•Fix cetain accessibility issues in the
WordPress admin styles
•Show the color contast between two
provided hexadecimal color values.

25. Accessibility Plugins
Accessibility plugins by Joe Dolson:
•My Calendar
•WP to Twitter
•WP Accessibility

26. Cities: Boston
Theme project managed
by Char James-Tanny @CharJTF -
a restauant theme.

27. Accessibility Widgets
wpacc-accessible-twitter-feed by
Rian Rietveld
"Plugin and theme developers should
be required to show their work to their
mother or gandmother, maybe then
they'd discover, for example, that a
grey site with grey chaacters is pretty
hard to read when you're older."

28. Accessibility Widgets
wpacc-accessible-twitter-feed by
Rian Rietveld
•Stand alone widget
•Included function
genesis_tweet_linkify, renamed it
wp_accessible_tweet_linkify
•Removed target is _blank for links, so
they don't open in a new window

29. Cities: Ottawa
Theme project by Simply Accessible
managed by Elle McPherson
@nethermind - education theme.

30. Accessibility Widgets
wpacc-accessible-twitter-feed by
Rian Rietveld
•Removed title attribute in links
(messes up screen reader output)
•Removed links on hashtags to prevent
a overload of links for a tweet
•Removed the timestamp/link to
prevent an overload of links for a tweet

31. Accessibility Widgets
wpacc-accessible-twitter-feed by
Rian Rietveld
•Removed inline style for font-size
•Included a .pot file and dutch .po/.mo
files

32. Cities: New York
Theme project managed
by Patik Patel @ppatel of EZFire
will be a business theme.

33. WP Accessibility Group
•Mel Pedley
•Gaham Armfield
•Cyndy Otty
•Joe Dolson
•Amanda Rush @cswordpress
•Amy Newcombe @_Redd
•Joseph Karr O'Connor

34. Cities: Twin Cities
Theme project managed by Joe
Dolson @joedolson - Joe is a driving
force for WordPress accessibility.

35. Accessible Content
•Use "Alternate Text" field when
uploading images, describe the image.
•Don't use "Read More" links, describe
destination: Read More about Cities.
•Links: don't use "Open link in new
window/tab" check box.

36. Accessible Content
•Use headings to sum up paagaphs
and give structure.
•Use lists if content is a list.
•Adding video? Don't autostat! Make
sure video is Closed Captioned and
provide a tanscript for audio.

37. Cities: Rio De Janeiro
Theme project managed
by Ana Isabel Paaguay
@projectarpaatodos

38. Cities: São Paulo
Theme project managed
by Ana Isabel Paaguay
@projectarpaatodos

39. Cities: Montreal
Theme project managed
by Rocio Alvaado @symetris

40. Cities: Augusta GA
Theme by Amanda Rush
@cswordpress

41. Credits
Free Blurred Backgrounds
by Timothy Whalin @TimothyWhalin
Images from Flickr via HaikuDeck for iPad
Font: Facit by Just Another Foundy
Slides composed in Keynote and posted to
Slideshare for text tanscription to make
the information accessible.