Empowering WordPress Accessibility with Community, Practical Tools, Education, and Real-World Impact

Anne Bovelett:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to yet another episode on the Open Channels FM podcast. My name is Anne Bovelett. I’m your host today and with me is someone by now well known in the WordPress community, Troy Chaplin from Canada.

Troy Chaplin:
Hi.

Anne Bovelett:
Hi, Troy.

Troy Chaplin:
Hey, Anne. How are you?

Anne Bovelett:
Good, thank you. And you?

Troy Chaplin:
I am well.

Anne Bovelett:
How did you even find the time to come onto the podcast? I know you’re very busy.

Troy Chaplin:
I mean, things that I want to do or things that I feel that are important, I just. I make the time and, you know, I figure it out somehow.

Anne Bovelett:
Ah, I’m so happy. So, yeah, I decided I wanted to talk to you today because we have a couple of things in common here. We’re both big fans of WordPress, we are very interested in accessibility. And there are two things that I find really interesting currently is that you are working for a big university where you created a plugin for accessibility to keep things more accessible internally. That I really think is admirable. And the other thing is you are very active in the WordPress community in general. You had a lot of pressure going on with WordCamp Canada. Wish I could have been there, but maybe next year. I think you have this broad mind and you develop and one of the things that is so important in accessibility is that other people who are getting into this start to feel more comfortable or start to ask the right questions, or feel comfortable coming to us and say, hey, I don’t know how to do this, can you explain? And of course, I think you’re a great guy in general, so welcome.

Troy Chaplin:
Thank you, Anne. Glad to be here.

Anne Bovelett:
So where do we get started today? Because we have a couple of things. We really like the ping pong duo here.

Troy Chaplin:
I can start off because I was going to actually ask you, and I know you’re probably going to ask me the same question, but how did you get involved in accessibility and how long have you been working in this area?

Anne Bovelett:
Well, I’ve been working in web development for 27 years. Hardcore in accessibility since 2020. So that’s five years now. And I fell into it because I saw a tweet about someone saying her blind father needed help again and he was crying because he couldn’t use the web by himself. And that hit me in the gut. And that’s where I decided I wanted to know everything there is about accessibility. And I’m a bit crazy like that. I have ADHD on steroids, so I went down the rabbit hole and I actually never crawled out. That’s how I Got into accessibility?

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, that’s actually. It’s an interesting way, like getting into it based on, you know, the feeling of being able to help someone do that. I’m a bit on the opposite side. I kind of got into it as part of my job function. So at the university, we need to adhere to some stricter regulations from the government around accessibility, so our whole team had to learn it. It’s one of those things that we make sure that it comes through first and foremost in our development right now is making sure that we do meet all of our accessibility requirements. But then in turn, after doing that for so many years and learning more around it and seeing the struggles that were out there, that’s when I started to get a little bit more interested in what I could do outside of my day to day. Much like yourself, to help other folks. And that’s sort of where I got into developing a tool that can help other folks and then also help developers help other folks as well.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. What is it like, do you feel that in your team, when you get new people to join your team at the university, that they are reluctant about the accessibility or that they think it’s a scary subject?

Troy Chaplin:
I don’t know about reluctant. I think people do understand when you come work for the university, that is part of the requirement for a developer here. I think it’s just more the education and being able to educate those folks on how to develop with accessibility in mind, like what they’re looking for, what tools to use. I know when I first got into it, there wasn’t as much information out there. The information that was out there was so confusing. It was written more like some obscure lawyer sort of document as opposed to something that’s more, I guess, like, pardon the pun, it wasn’t accessible to me as someone trying to read it and understand took a very long time to get there. So I think a lot of folks sort of still encounter some of those issues and they don’t really know where there’s good spaces, good communities, good outlets to get more information and to find folks that can help provide that information.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. Are there any special sources of which you say, like, oh, that was really helpful for us or still is, or I mean, I know loads of them, but it’s different for everybody where some resonate with people and some don’t. And I mean, you’re talking about the WCAG guidelines and they are drier than the Sahara in summer.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, we do have to dive into those often. We’re quite fortunate that we do have some Folks on campus right now that do know a lot more about Excel. So there’s one person on my team in particular that does a lot of accessibility work, does a lot of reviews. We have a tool internally that he can run against some of our sites. So he’s really fantastic at helping and providing us documentation and the resources and the guides of what we need to do. And then he’s really great at finding extra sources if we’re still not clear for us. So I’m really fortunate that we have that as part of our workflow within our team. But as far as, like, what other folks do and how they approach it, it’s a tough space. Like, it’s such an important space, but I feel that the information is not as readily available for most developers. And I feel that’s probably one of the biggest barriers and why we see a lot of developers. I don’t know if intimidated is the right word, but I know a lot of developers don’t really jump into that space because it is sometimes a tougher, more confusing space.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, it probably is. I think that is caused by the fact that they are working out of context. So I think accessibility is one of the few things where you do need the context. So where normally teams can live on their own planets, team development, team design, team content, suddenly they have to start to work together. I think sources that give you the why of things are much more helpful. So, I mean, one of the resources I dream of making is where you end up on a page and in several forms. People can first hear about a serious situation. I mean, you have people at university who greatly benefit from having everything accessible. There are students that use assistive technology, but probably the teachers, especially the older ones as well, because better contrast things are easier to use. But I think the resources that there are about accessibility are very often too much all in one trying to provide context, but it should be done differently. I think I’m thinking of something where you end up on a page and then you hear how someone using a screen reader, how he or she experiences a page, and then boom. This is important for you as a developer, this is important for you as a designer, and this is important for you as a content creator. Maybe that is the kind of resource that we need. But it might be a good hackathon project or something for CloudFest, I don’t know.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, or even a tool of some sort that is more cost effective for large organizations. You can see some out there that are really, really good. But I know just from my experience, when we’ve looked at larger tools like the cost is really outrageous in some cases. And I think one of the things I wouldn’t be surprised that if a company is choosing between supporting accessibility versus spending a lot of money, if you’re not in an industry that requires it, I fear that they make the choice to not spend the money which doesn’t put the users first. Not to say this is the case for all companies, but I’m sure it’s a factor for a lot of companies when you’re faced with a large financial cost in a company that you might not have a lot of extra.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, this is another layer that probably accessibility resources could use because I’ve been reading up on research recently Semrush published a great article where they have been testing 10,000 sites together with a couple of other folks. I will share the link in the show Notes where it just shows what an increase you have in conversions and everything when your site is more accessible and in SEO results. So it’s one of the reasons why I usually use the financial bat to hit people on the head. But of course I think like, well, let’s not, let’s not take the university for example, but let’s say a tax office, right? I don’t know what tax offices are like in Canada or in the us but I know for the Netherlands, for example, you can call them and then you’re on hold forever and on hold forever and then they’re going to tell you you have to go to the website and look up your information and then you’re like, this is why I’m calling you, because I cannot find it or because I don’t understand the language or. And that is very costly for society as well. So I know of a tax office. It was, I think it was on city level in the Netherlands that got their stuff accessible and suddenly support requests dropped by 70% or something like that. I may get wrong on the numbers. The numbers were really high. So that’s a lot of taxpayers money that is not being wasted because things were efficient through accessibility. And I think those examples are what’s missing, don’t you think? Or do you have ideas about that?

Troy Chaplin:
I mean, I never really thought of it from that point of view, but I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if your numbers were accurate if not higher in a lot of cases. Like I could see a lot of folks having to call in to get that support just based on the fact that they can’t get it on the website the way they should be able to.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, so if accessibility documentation would be made that way. Yeah, that would be mighty interesting. And for example, you and your plugin. Right, let’s talk about that. I mean, you wrote that out of a practical necessity, but in the end it is also saving a lot of resources for the university.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, I mean, the plugin kind of came about. It was kind of an accident, really. I was at WordCamp Canada last year and I was having a conversation with Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher around a couple of accessibility things in Core, specifically the header block. And I was asking Nick about why I couldn’t remove the H1 in the content area. And at the time we were using a hybrid theme, so we weren’t full on block theme. So I didn’t want the H1 available to my users in the content area. And Nick being who he is, he came back to me like the next day with a potential solution and we kind of talked it out and it was really cool. And I know he talked to a few other folks during WordCamp. I believe Amber from Equalize Digital was there, probably had some conversations with her as well. And so that to me was sort of like, wait, now he just overnight kind of came back with a solution that helped meet an additional accessibility need that I wanted. And I was like, you know, could I do some stuff around that, like, could I make a difference, you know, as quickly and what looked to be as easy as what Nick did at the time. Now, I’d also saw a video just before WordCamp from Ryan around. There’s a post locking and unlocking functionality in Core. And I kind of put two and two together and thought, can I check or validate block attributes and then lock the posts or pages from being published if they don’t meet the accessibility requirements? So the header, for example, we stripped out the H1 once that feature went into Core. But we’ll take the table, for example. The table block. Right now you can put a table on the page. It does not have a header by default, you have to actively turn it on at the time, maybe it’s changed. I haven’t looked in a little while. But at the time there was no method for me to force the header to be on without creating a variation of the block, nor was there a way for me to remove the option. So there was always a way for the user to put a table on the page, remove the header and break accessibility. Yeah, so, yeah, so what I ended up doing was looking at like those situations and just writing some simple JavaScript validations that then once those Attributes were not set the way I needed them to be. We would lock the publishing from the posts or pages. So the plugin sort of started at WordCamp Canada last year and I kind of walked away from WordCamp Canada and I had this idea. So I started building out a real simple demo around a couple of blocks and then we started testing it a little bit around the university stuff and. And right now the universe has actually got a very different code set than what my plugin does. I created these. These have been created quite separately just because I was trying to achieve very different things. Like. Like at the university, we don’t have the options to turn off the block checks versus my plugins gives the user the control over the severity, whether they want to make it an error or they want to make it a warning or just not to do it at all. So trying to give people the choice. So yeah, so I kind of went back and forth and I learned a lot because I took two different approaches on how to build it and I just kept going at it. I was really into the idea that I thought or I hoped that this plugin could make a difference. Then I got the idea a little bit later that I also wanted to support other developers. So initially the plugin I developed were checking the button title and attribute or sorry, the button title and URL. It was checked the table header, it was checking the header, the heading hierarchy got added after the fact. There’s a couple more I was checking. I have to go back and look at my notes. But one of the things I really wanted to do was add the developer support. So I wanted external block developers to be able to add few lines of code, add their own custom JavaScript to validate their own attributes, but then seamlessly integrate with the whole system that I had put together so that way they didn’t have to go and reinvent that wheel. So I developed that over the summer and started building that out a little bit and started testing it. I got to the point recently, after the WordCamp Canada 2025, I got an opportunity to talk to some developers and get some feedback. I got one from one of the developers from True Knowledge had mentioned that hey, the button block, there’s an option in there that you can switch the element to be a button tag as opposed to an A. So what I noticed at that point, I never even noticed that one, but I just recently put out a release that allows you to change to the button and then the URL check gets removed because you don’t need to have the URL on the button itself. Right. That’s for your on click actions.

Anne Bovelett:
Mm.

Troy Chaplin:
So we made that change and then I was talking with Ryan Welcher again and he had some really great feedback on this. This plugin as a validation sort of API. So I started reframing things as more than just, you know, for accessibility, but more so you can validate, you know, any block attribute. And then from there I also added. And this just came out in a release a couple days ago. I added the ability to validate against post meta as well in the plugin. So.

Anne Bovelett:
Right. I still have to check that. I’ve been gotten around. I saw the new release, but it’s a bit wild currently. So. Yeah, I mean, that is wonderful work. I mean, and for people listening who are like, what are they talking about? This is so technical. So, um, just a quick explanation, for example, about headings, right. Those are titles in. In your website and they have to be in the correct order. And what I usually do to explain it to people is like, have you ever tried creating a Google Doc or Word document? And then you wanted to generate the table of contents, right? And then you have put in your headings and you’re like, that heading is so big. That is ugly. Let me. Let me get another one. It looks different. And then your document looks really great to you, and then you start trying to generate that table of contents, and that looks like a train wreck. And that usually means you have really messed up with your heading order. This is something to research for yourself in Google or any search engine what that means. So, yeah, just to give an explanation, because one of the things I noticed, Troy, is that in a lot of podcasts, when we’re talking about these things, we forget who’s listening. There are so many different kinds of people listening. And for everybody, if you have questions, if you think we’ve been talking voodoo here, shoot me a message. I’m more than happy to explain. And yeah, so. So that. Or this thing about the button. You know, a button. We have this thing. Designers love to make links look like buttons. I’m one of those designers, by the. But that provides people with a very technical challenge, especially if this button is not a link that is going somewhere. If this button really has to do something, then the code gets complicated to make it accessible.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, I find educating content editors is definitely a tough one. So one of the things that I’ve. I’ve tried hard to do with the block accessibility checks plugin that I’m building, and it’s a new feature that I’m actually looking to build. So right now, if you’re in violation of one of the validations in the inspector controls in the sidebar, you’ll get a little notification. Whether it be an error or warning, it’ll be colored in red or yellow, but it tells you buttons require text or tables require. It tells you exactly what. What you’ve done wrong.

Anne Bovelett:
I never. Sorry, Troy. I never checked before. I forget. One of the things that a lot of people always forget about is voice control. And there’s something interesting about voice control. So I don’t know what it’s like on, on a Microsoft machine, but for anyone using a Mac, you can turn it on. It’s really fun because you could tell your computer what to do. Right. So if you’re on a site where someone created a button or a link that looks like a button, there is text on this button or this button imposter. But if then someone decided to add an area attribute being an area label, because some builders allow you to do that. Thank God. If you are trying to be overly helpful and you’re, you know, your designer said you can only right click here. Okay. Click here doesn’t say anything. But you want to be helpful to people using assistive technology like screen readers. So you’re going to write with this button, you’re going to achieve blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Really nice. You really don’t have to do it that extensive. People aren’t stupid. But the thing is, if your sentence in your area label did not contain click here. The voice control is going, like, what? Where do I what? Because if you tell it click here. Click the. Click here. It’s not going to understand it. Does your plugin check that?

Troy Chaplin:
No, I never really considered that side of it. I got to go back because I’m thinking, does the core button block allow for a label that would be secondary to the button text? I don’t think so.

Anne Bovelett:
No, it doesn’t. But there are builders that do. Grade Suite is one of them. You can add ARIA labels and attributes. That would be a cool thing to have as a check.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, I’m going to add a little feature in my GitHub repo after this call.

Anne Bovelett:
Cool, right? Yeah.

Troy Chaplin:
I mean, I’m always looking for new features, so I mean, anything that, like those sorts of examples that I might not be thinking about at the time, definitely more than happy to hear about ways I can do things better.

Anne Bovelett:
You know, I was listening to Nicholas Steenhout, who’s also an accessibility specialist. He’s from Canada as well, if I have correctly. And one day, Nick did with Equalize Digital, he did a meetup with them, and he had actually spoken to a lot of users. He did interviews with users who were telling what the world is like for them. And he said, Even after 25 years, I still learn. And that was amazing, because every time, you know, if anyone working in accessibility ever tells you, I know it all, run, baby, run.

Troy Chaplin:
Well, I mean, as tech evolves and things change and we get more tools to do things with, with that just comes more accessibility issues.

Anne Bovelett:
Yes. And the user perspective. That’s the user perspective. I mean, there was this funny meme video coming around with software developer and the testing team where they. The example was what children have, where you put blocks. A circle block needs to go in the circle hole, and the triangle goes in the triangle hole. And then there was a square one. Right. Do you know that you know that video?

Troy Chaplin:
No, not the video. I mean, I know the game, the video.

Anne Bovelett:
I was trying to find it recently. If anyone hears this and knows, like, it’s that video, please share it back to me. I nearly died. Because we don’t know how a user interacts with our software or our sites if we don’t do a lot of user testing. And so in this meme, she was like, okay, yeah, the square one. And the square one. Oh, that’s good. Yeah, yeah. And then the user was taking the triangle one, and she was like, yeah, you put that in the triangle, and this user put this in the square one. It will ended up that user putting every single item into the square box, because they all fit in the square box. You’d probably have to see it. This is really not good for a podcast to describe this, but this was. I’ll go and try and find it, Jared, because it was just too funny. This is a user using something in another way, because you made it possible. That’s interesting. Did you do any user testing in the university, or do you do any user testing for whatever your team is creating?

Troy Chaplin:
I know we’ve done some work. There’s a department on campus that is more involved in accessibility and stuff like that, and I know that we’ve done some work with them. My colleague that I mentioned earlier that does some accessibility work, he’s part of a. I think it’s a committee or a group around accessibility, and they get together and discuss a lot of those things. So, yeah, he brings a lot of our voice and our concerns to that committee, and they talk about it at a different level. And I know he’s more involved in a lot of that, that side of things and then brings, you know, errors back to us and then, you know, we create new bug reports and things that we need to start working on from the development side.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. Do you remember some really big surprises like where you were like, oh my, I never thought of that.

Troy Chaplin:
There’s nothing that surprises me anymore. We have like over 800 sites and okay, probably over a thousand content editors around campus. So I mean I’ve seen some fantastic stuff and I’ve seen some, some really questionable stuff, but I, I don’t think anything surprises me anymore. I’m just trying to think like I think the, the worst one I see is how people use page. Sorry page. How people use tables. Like tables to me are the biggest problem as far as, you know, editing content and, and you know, the lack of, of checks and around some of that stuff. Like I see people putting essentially Stephen King novels worth of content in tables with bullets and lists and accordions. Like I’ve seen a whole lot of just really horrible, horrible tables. Yeah, those, those are, those are definitely the ones where. And we’re going through a migration process now into a new modern block based thing theme. So we’re seeing a lot more of this content coming out. But again, our team has now taken this as an opportunity to help educate people again. You know, it’s been quite some time that we’ve had to go through this process. So now it’s just an opportunity to kind of reiterate the importance of understanding what you can and can’t do and being able to move away from the old table that was in TinyMCE and the WYSIWYG editor into the Gutenberg table was. It’s causing me a lot of extra support or causes us a lot of extra support. But I think it’s worthwhile because the core block, the core table block does not allow you to put headers and bullets and all of this content. Yeah. So we’ve had a lot of people come to us going, hey, how come I can’t put all of this in the table? Like, well, that’s not what a table’s used for.

Anne Bovelett:
Well, but this is actually the table that you could do with TinyMC is a bit like this box.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, exactly. Do whatever you want with it.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, you can do whatever you want with it. And people don’t realize it. They’re like, oh, I can use this to change the layout of my page or let’s do that. I don’t know about you, but that’s how I started out at the end of the 90s, I was messing around with tables and if we had to put a design that had rounded corners, we needed nine cells, table cells to slice those corners in. And I just. And if you think about it, man, remember the screen readers have been there forever. They were there as well at that time.

Troy Chaplin:
Can you imagine going back to having to build a site with a Dreamweaver slices and tables at this point right now, with all of the accessibility stuff out there and all that we know now compared to what we knew or didn’t know 20 years ago. No.

Anne Bovelett:
No, I can’t. On the other hand, I think a lot of the stuff that we did back then, especially those who were working in text, text editors, just creating HTML, a lot of things were more accessible. The table stuff was horrible, but everything else, okay, yeah, it looked like crap, but it was accessible. And I don’t remember who said it, but probably more than one accessibility specialist said it. The web and HTML actually is great for accessibility, but people just wreck it and they don’t know it, right?

Anne Bovelett:
Feel about those libraries, those component libraries that people are using?

Troy Chaplin:
Honestly, I haven’t really dabbled with too many component libraries unless it’s like the stuff that’s provided by Gutenberg and in the core of WordPress to build what I build. We actually build and maintain our own component library for the university, which is our digital brand. So I come at it from that point of view where we ensure that our components are accessible right off the start because we’re required to and because we should. So I can’t really speak to stuff like, you know, we’ve looked at Materia, UI and Chakra and a few of the other big players out there just to get a sense of how they build things and to get ideas for, you know, our approaches and stuff. So we use it as that sort of resource. But I’ve never actually built with any of those tools.

Anne Bovelett:
Wow. Well, if you’re ever bored and you want to see something funny. Well, it’s actually bitter Bittersweet is a lot of the component libraries out there are so big that people assume this is the most used component library, so this must be accessible. Right. And it’s like, it’s the same thing with people’s opinions. You know, the opinion of the majority doesn’t make it true. So that’s. I think that’s something that happened. People with good intentions, it’s always some good intentions created those. Those components, and all they did was use div and span, because that’s easy, right?

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah. I wonder if that’s just. Just something that, you know, they don’t have time to do or if it’s just something that, you know, they don’t bother to do because they’re not required to do. Or like, I wonder. I’m just really curious what the reasoning is behind that. Or is it the fact that it was a small team that just grew really quickly and, you know, they were just trying to. Trying to keep it all together.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. Maybe I should go and dig for people who were there when they started creating these things. I think it was just not knowing about it. This is also what I run into a lot in general, where I walk into development teams and these people are feeling super uncomfortable because here this little blonde, nasty lady is coming and is telling them, everything you’re doing is wrong. That’s not what I’m saying. But this is how they translated it. Like someone, okay, you have to change everything because they were unaware. And this is a very basic reaction, I think, when you are. It’s the same when you were little and you’re doing something you don’t know you’re not supposed to do it. You know, there’s a. You’re from Canada, right? I went to Toronto when I was 12. And. No, my brother was 12, I was 14. And we were at the big film festival and we were bored as usual. And then we had to go to some party in the city hall, the one with the big tower. And we were so bored. And my brother suddenly comes to me and says, hey, I’m gonna make a. You gotta see this. There’s a lot of money in the water, right? So we walked to the water and we found all these coins. And he had been Collecting his pockets full of coins. And I was like, I’m not sure if we’re allowed to do that. So then we went back in. I was like, let’s ask mom and dad. Okay, so we’re in. And my parents were like, what have you been doing? Are you crazy? You can’t do that. And then the mayor came. So first we were totally fried over the fact that we got punished and yelled at for something we weren’t even aware we were not allowed to do. We were just kids. And then the mayor came and he understood and he says, you know what, guys? Go put it back. I’ll give you a tour of the tower. So he took us up there.

Troy Chaplin:
Nice.

Anne Bovelett:
This sensation of getting punished for something you’re not aware of, I think we all carry that with us from our childhood. And so if you come in for accessibility and you tell anyone, designer, developer, like, it’s all, it all has to be done all over, everyone. I hate you.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, it’s an odd one. Like, I think, I think back to myself even just a few years back, you know, had someone approached me and pointed out, I guess pointed out, you know, my lack of understanding or some of the faults in my approach to work, I probably would have taken that in a negative way. You know, at the time, you know, I thought that what I was doing was amazing. Like, you know, I wasn’t, I wasn’t able to really kind of look within and see the faults and see, you know, some, some of the things I could do better. So, you know, perhaps there’s a little bit of the aspect there, but I also think a lot of it comes down to the approach. Like, you come in there and it’s intimidating up front, but I think it’s, you know, you intro your session accordingly and I think you can really set the tone and make people feel comfortable. So I think there’s, there’s two sort of approaches or there’s, there’s two, I guess, competing factors in here that can make it quite uncomfortable. Like, you know, I’ve realized now that I’m older and, you know, I’m, I’m more willing to accept that I do need help from a lot of people around me and in turn I get better because of that help. So I think understanding that has allowed me to be more open minded and be really open to criticism, even the worst criticism. But there are times too where even though I can say I’ve been open to criticism, there’s been times where there’s been heated discussions and they don’t get approached in the right way. It all depends. It’s a situational thing too, in some cases.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, that’s true, that’s true. I see this in testing processes when companies don’t yet want to listen when we tell them it’s cheaper for you to rebuild the whole thing than to have us tested. And you trying to remediate it because you’re trying to put floors in existing tower buildings, to use an analogy. And then they want us to test. And then I live in Germany, right. And the Germans are very strict, especially when it’s about compliance, also how they communicate. And I had to tell a lot of the testers that were reporting, you know, I would see the headlines of every test, this is wrong, this is bad, this doesn’t work. It was all negative, you know, and I, I was like, okay, how do I get these people to be more positive? And I think a lot of people should do that. And then I said, try to tell them what they have to do to make it right. So don’t start the headline with the contrast is bad or the contrast is not sufficient. You’re going to say, if you improve the contrast, this will pass.

Troy Chaplin:
A positive approach makes a big, big difference. Even when you’re trying to point out something that’s really incredibly negative or just really bad in nature. As far as an accessibility issue is.

Anne Bovelett:
Concerned, someone once came to me and said, on your site, and on your site, of course, it’s an accessibility specialist. They want your site to be the holiest of the holiest. Holy. And at that time, the stuff I was working with couldn’t do that. And then I also got offended, you know, in the beginning, the first response is like, who are you? You know, and, and this person said, yeah, when my, when I have my computer in dark mode, it really sucks. I was like, I don’t like it that you talk to me like that.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah. Having this, this whole idea in my head from a really early age was, I felt really important for, for some of the ways that I approach my work and now how I like to lead groups. My very, very first job out of college, I did graphic design in college. I was not web developer at the time. This was in the, in 2000, actually, my very first job, three months into this contract and they had let me go. And the reason was that the owner had told me that I wasn’t good and I was never going to make it in this industry. That was his words. And I said, well, you’re wrong and I’m going to prove you Wrong. That to me, right. There was sort of an eye opening thing around, like how you approach. Even if you have to let someone go from a company, there’s a better way to approach that and there’s a more positive way to do that. I could have been encouraged because I wasn’t bad. I found that after the company actually went under because they were doing shady things behind the scenes. But, you know, I use that for motivation for myself and I think back about that that exact day frequently just based on the fact that like, I try to put myself forward in a more positive way. And I feel like, like, to your point, you know, you’ll get much more, you’ll gain more by being more positive even when you’re trying to point out something that is negative in nature.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, maybe, maybe we could write a guide about that one day. Oh, man. I also want to write so many things and do so many things. I mean, you are super productive. I don’t understand how you do it. You have a family, you are working, you are writing blog articles on the developer blog for WordPress. I see you jump around in Slack and it’s impressive. Really?

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but doing stuff with WordPress or within the community or anything within or around web dev and design, it’s also a hobby and a passion. So, you know, I do it all day long for the university and then like you said at nighttime when my kids go to bed and you know, if my wife wants to hang out, great. But if, you know, if we’re not doing anything, nine times out of 10, I’m going to sit down, throw on some music and, you know, write an article for the dev blog or, you know, write some new feature for a plugin or I’m working on like just three other ideas that I’m starting to sort of build out a little bit. There’s always something that I want to do. You had mentioned earlier that you had ADHD and I think I must have some form of ADHD because I can’t shut my brain down. I just roll with it, which is why I can be so productive. I just, I don’t shut it down. I just like kind of let it go.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. Do you recognize this thing? People say, why don’t you ever relax, go to the beach, lie down, read a book. And I’m like, that’s punishment.

Troy Chaplin:
I started to think about that in myself a little bit more over the last couple of years because my son has gotten diagnosed with ADHD. So we had to go through that process and figure out how we can support and help him. But then I started to notice some of his tendencies are coming from me. So I can see the correlation immediately. So I’m just old enough that I don’t care to go and figure it out for myself. I just roll with it.

Anne Bovelett:
At this point I realized that my mom has it so. And my grandmother had it too. That was. That was absolutely interesting. I think brings me to a totally different topic, actually. It’s AI. AI is like. It drives some people crazy. There are a lot of things with AI that I don’t really appreciate. But if you start working with AI and you are like we are and you get it to give you the context between things you are going on. I don’t know, you’re being supercharged. Did that happen for you as well?

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, almost instantly, to be honest. Like as soon as we started using AI, like I had subscribed to ChatGPT pretty early to play around with it and then we ended up getting a copilot get up copilot license at the university that we started using. And then for personal stuff I subscribed to Cursor. I think immediately it leveled me up, but it was what I found the most useful for me at the time I started using it was I was really diving deeper and deeper into block development and sometimes your searches, just with Google searches, we’re turning up articles from the last 10 years because as we all know with WordPress, there’s like eight different ways to do the same thing in some cases. But if you’re trying to figure out something that’s new and more modern, there’s already been 10, 20 years worth of fantastic content that covers it. But from classic theme point of view. So one thing that AI did for me immediately was find me the functions that I needed from the JavaScript libraries that were provided by Gutenberg. And I was instantly able to start putting together the blocks that I was struggling early on. So that was like the first big eye opener of how I could leverage it to educate me. And that’s how I try to promote it to other folks around using it as an education tool. But I’m also very clear to not blindly trust it because I’ve seen some stuff come back from it.

Anne Bovelett:
A lot of crap. Yeah.

Troy Chaplin:
So terrible. And I could see this being a problem in the future of the WordPress ecosystem with how many people could put out all these plugins and stuff like that. I mean, I know the review team does a Fantastic job and they’re probably going to catch a lot of the stuff, but I mean, I don’t know if they’re looking at every line of code to make sure the code is a okay or how they leverage AI to do that. Yeah, there’s lots of good and there’s lots of bad there. I mean, I mean, it’s not going anywhere. So, you know, I do hope that more people don’t shy away from it and learn how to leverage it within your workflow. You know, my workflow is not going to work for everyone, but I feel that everyone does have an opportunity now to figure out how it can help them the best and make them more productive and, you know, save them a lot of time. Like find the ways that you can cut down the time on tedious tasks and then focus on new initiatives or new ideas and how you can grow with it.

Anne Bovelett:
I saw Amber Hinds. Who? Who? Or Heinz. I never know if I should say Hinds or Heinz. I think Heinz. She created a video, posted that on YouTube where she showed how she uses AI to solve an accessibility issue in a lousy page builder. And I’m saying lousy because it was again, something that hadn’t been coded right. And I’m like, we’re in 2025, go and fix it, folks. This is where I’m a bit icky. But it was so cool to see how she was iterating on it, how she was thinking, because she knows what to look for. And I think if people learn to do this and if you ask AI to code something for you, ask it whether that has an accessibility ready output and why. If you don’t combine that, it’s going to tell you soap stories till the end of the universe. But if you keep asking the AI for context, you get very interesting things. Or then ask, could this be done more efficient? I think that’s also very educational.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, I definitely enjoy watching videos of folks using it. I have to go back and look at the stuff Amber’s doing because I would like to see how she uses it to help find accessibility stuff.

Anne Bovelett:
She made it write JavaScript. It was amazing. I wouldn’t have come to the idea myself to do it that way, which is like, wow, yeah, I can share the link with you later in Slack or I’m gonna have to find that link anyway. We’re gonna put that in the show notes. I mean, Equalize Digital is doing great stuff out there.

Troy Chaplin:
I love what they’re doing.

Anne Bovelett:
By the way, did you see that plugin that they released, that would be probably good for the university as well. The WP Archive, I was looking at it.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah. When they released, I actually was fortunate enough to be around for a little bit when I think it was Chris. No, not Chris, it was Steve. And one of their developers, whose name escapes me, had done just a live feed or live stream, I think, on Friday afternoon, just talking about the plugin before they released it on a Friday, which was cool. So I caught a little bit of that and just watched what they were doing. It’s a really interesting product. I love the concept of it. It’s really funny. I had a support ticket come through this morning where someone was looking for a piece of content from 2018. And the first thing I thought was, like, if I had that Archive plugin, I could probably get that content.

Anne Bovelett:
Right? I mean, it’s a genius move. And it’s not like, guys, I’m not being sponsored by Equalize Digital or anything, but, I mean, they are one of the very rare companies in the WordPress space who really create stuff that supports us. Their plugin is free on.org WP Archive is not. But, hey, man, you gotta go pay for something, right?

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah. Even when they put out their new course the other day, I noticed and I tweeted back at Chris and I said, that’s a really great price. You’ve really broken down that barrier of, you know, like, so their new course is a fantastic price. Like, anybody that is looking for something, you know, that can help them, you know, educate their environment, like, going out to buy that course.

Anne Bovelett:
But this is where I love. Because they’re a living community, so they’re doing something that makes them a living, but it benefits an entire community. I think that is really, really, really cool.

Troy Chaplin:
But they’re trying to make it affordable for the rest of us. And I think that’s an important thing to point out. Like, they’re not trying to go there and, you know, make a fortune. Like, they’re, you know, they’re obviously trying to make money for themselves, but they’re also trying to make sure that it’s good and affordable for the rest of us. And at the end of the day, that just brings nothing but positivity around all the work that they’re doing and their company in general. I love following what they’re doing.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, me too. It’s so overwhelming. Like, I have this long list of stuff from people, like the ones from Access from Equalize Digital, where I’m like, I put it on my share list, and that share list is so long. And I’ve got to get my assistant to create posts, you know, and say, you create these posts now. Because I keep thinking I’m going to create a whole list of posts tomorrow and tomorrow never comes, right? Because it’s another tomorrow. But yeah, I mean, even subscribing to their RSS feed is amazing. And the same for open channels. By the way, a lot of people don’t realize that this used to be do the woo before. Now it’s Open Channels fm and if you just subscribe to their RSS feed, there are great, great podcasts coming out every day. Yeah, I love it very much. Do you listen a lot, Troy? I mean, you just told me you were watching that video from Chris and now from Steve and their developer. But do you listen to a lot of podcasts?

Troy Chaplin:
Not as many podcasts as I’d like to. I definitely throw on a lot of videos. I’m more of a visual learner, like I find. And this might tie into the fact that I think I might have some ADHD. Like I can listen to something and I don’t retain it, but if I’m listening and kind of half watching, I can work and be watching something and I can retain a little bit more. And it’s just, I don’t know, it’s just maybe the way I consume information.

Anne Bovelett:
The way people process information is different for everybody. I found that through accessibility I had to learn about code because how on earth am I going to help a developer to create better code for accessibility if I can’t point it out? I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to be the one who says, look, you find the documentation there or you have to think about this. Which made me think in code, which is wild because I have dyslexia. But I think for me, text numbers are combined, they are images. So I can listen to the Gutenberg Changelog, for example. And then I’ll never forget JB o’. Dra. He’s been the lead of the releases a lot. You know him, right? Yeah, he was talking about that he wrote a plugin for a language attribute on blocks. And I remember that two or three years ago and they were talking about it in a technical way and I just could see the code fly by, like, oh, that’s where you put it and that’s where that attribute is supposed to go. Right. Whereas if I would have to watch that code on screen, I would just go cross eyed.

Troy Chaplin:
So you’re actually, you’re able to visualize the spoken words Yeah, I don’t always have that ability. I mean, I guess in different contexts. Like, I can sit in a meeting and someone’s describing a feature they want or what they want it to look like. And I can picture that. It’s just. There’s something about the retention. Like, if I’m trying to learn something, I think more specifically, like my retention, my ability to retain that information is lost if I’m listening to something. My wife gets mad with me all the time because, like, she might read me a document that came from the school for our kids or something, and I can’t. I had. I have to tell, like, you’re wasting your time. Like, I need to read it myself. I can’t listen to you because it goes in one ear and out the other.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, that’s interesting, right? The only thing that I don’t have that with this code. I have it like you have with the other things. It’s like spoken instructions. Someone says, go to the kitchen and then open the closet and then on that shelf. And you loved me. After shelf, I’m just like, I have no idea why you want from me. Yeah. All right. So is there anything special that you would love to share with our audience today? This is your chance.

Troy Chaplin:
I. I don’t know. I mean, I would love to get more feedback on the block accessibility checks plugin that I’m working on. I’m sure we’ll probably be able to drop a link in the show. Notes to that. I just put out the new version 2.3.0 which adds validation for post meta. I’m working on improvements on design. I would love to build a feature where not only am I providing little bits of information on what rule has been broken, but I want to be able to add some links where if people want to go and get additional information, you know, find some external sources so people can help educate themselves. I think mainly I would love to get more feedback from developers who are building blocks that might want to leverage the tools that I’m providing and how can I make those better for developers? Like, one of the ideas I have that came from WordCamp[ is instead of registering the blocks in php, could they be done in the block JSON and this break down another sort of layer to integration Also on top of that, I also love to Write for the WordPress Developers Blog and we’re always looking for new writers such as yourself. Congratulations on your first article for the WordPress developer blog that you just published.

Anne Bovelett:
The other day that went all over the net. I was just so Surprised? Yeah.

Troy Chaplin:
Yeah, they really did get that stuff out there. I was really surprised too when I wrote my first couple of articles and the feedback I got and it just made me motivated to write more. So we’re always looking for more folks to write and if you don’t feel like you can or want to write, but you would love to be able to contribute and review articles and provide feedback, we’re always looking for more people to help with that side of things. So you can feel free to reach out to myself or several other people. We have a. I think it’s the core dev blog channel on the Make Slack group. Yeah. Those are two big areas that I love to contribute to outside of my day to day, and I love to promote those because the more people, the more resources we can get out there.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, exactly. Thank you for doing all that and I’m really honored to be part of that team now in the developer blog.

Troy Chaplin:
I’m excited that you’re a part of it because you bring a whole different perspective on a topic that I don’t think is been written about too often on the developer blog. So, like, you know, you mentioned you were interested in maybe doing some more stuff around accessibility. I think that would be fantastic. To help educate other developers on how to work within those confines.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. And then I hope they’re all going to help on the accessibility of WordPress. That would be so great.

Troy Chaplin:
You never know.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. Because, I mean, we had so many updates for accessibility coming to our new version 6.9, and if you check all these tickets, it’s all Joe Dawson, who’s, I don’t know how he does it, he’s doing all these tickets, he’s remediating all that stuff. And of course it’s not just Joe, there are people behind it. But I remember Joe saying to me, like, you know, I can’t be the only decision maker on a ticket. I need feedback. I would be very happy if people come to me and say, hey, I agree or I disagree, because. So, yeah, let’s see if we can make that a joint effort to infuse the accessibility team as well. Yeah. All right, well, Troy, thank you very much. I really enjoyed talking to you. I always do. And if we ever have new topics or you’re like, I have something really wild to tell you, you can just come back on. You know that, right?

Troy Chaplin:
I’d be happy to.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. Because I mean, multisite 800. You just said 800 websites, 1,000 content creators. I mean, that’s a whole, whole different level of using WordPress, right? So yeah, it would be cool to talk about that one day. So thank you everybody for listening. We’re putting all the links in the show notes. If you have questions, feel free to get in touch either with me or come and find troy and make WordPress Slack and we’re happy to talk back.

Troy Chaplin:
Absolutely. I’m always on slack, so happy to help or provide any info people might want.

Anne Bovelett:
Thank you.

Troy Chaplin:
Awesome. Thank you Ann.