Exploring Accessibility, AI, SEO, and Learning Pathways at WordCamp Asia 2024

Adam Silverstein:
Hi, this is Adam and my talk for WordCamp. Asia is INPA new metric for interactivity. One tip for my talk. When you’re building a product or site and aiming for good user experience metrics, you need to consider user experience over the entire page life, not just the loading part, because user spend over 90% of their time on web pages after they load. So I invite you to attend my session to learn all about the new core web vital metric that helps you do just that. Interaction to next Paint or INP.

Alex Kirk:
Hi, my name is Alex Kirk and my lightning talk is called Translate Live in Context Translation using WordPress Playground. I’m going to talk about this tool on translate WordPress dot org that allows translators to run a plugin or theme in the WordPress playground alongside with a special version of Glotpress called Local Glotpress that adds inline translation capabilities. It’ll highlight text that can be or is already translated with a color shadow and translators can more easily find a good and fitting translation. Having the visual context of where the text appears allows them to easily make the right call of whether that text is a headline or a button. The tool is also useful for plugin creators as they can quickly switch between different language versions of their plugin to see how well it is translated. And here’s my tip for plugin creators. Make use of the new blueprint plugin preview functionality of the plugin directory. The blueprint that you provide there will also be used by translate live so that your translators don’t need to spend time configuring your plugin but can start translating right away. Thanks and see you at my talk.

Benjamin Intal:
Hi, I’m Benjamin Intal. I’m the founder and lead developer of Stackable Pagebuilder Blocks for WordPress. Here’s my tip that I’d like to share with you. The default 2024 theme is a chameleon and you can mostly transform it to anything you’d like. Using the site editor is key here. It’s your headed editor, photo editor, and template editor. You can use it to build completely bespoke templates, blog or archive pages to showcase portfolios or your bestsellers. Even the static pages like your 404 page you can fully build. Unlike before in the old days. There are a lot of innovations taking place in the block space, especially in the site editor, so if you haven’t checked it out for a long time now, try it out again. It may simplify a lot of your current block-based workflows. Join me in going more in depth on this topic. I’ll be sharing more workflow and efficiency tips on my session in WordCamp Asia titled How to Achieve an Efficient Workflow with a Block Editor Insight Editor. It’ll be on March 9, track three at 3:00 PM. See you there.

Hannah Swain Lovik:
Hi there. My name is Hannah Swain Lovik and I’ll be at WordCamp Asia giving a lightning talk on From FOMO to JOMO. Discovering the joy of missing out our lives are relatively short. One popular book says that we have about 4,000 weeks if you live to be 80 years old. The emphasis is then often on using our time as efficiently as we possibly can. That generally involves productivity methods. After all, the more productive you can be, the more efficient you can be, right? The problem is that no matter how efficient you are, that time will just fill up with more work. No matter how many times you empty your inbox, it’s just going to fill up again. Instead, think about what you really want to achieve, what is truly meaningful for you in these 4,000 weeks. Then do that, not the busy work of emptying your unending inbox. I know that’s easier said than done, recognizing that you’re operating from a checkbox mentality of just getting things done rather than thinking about what you truly want to achieve. That’s a first step. I’ll be happy to tell you more about this at my session at WordCamp Asia. I’m looking forward to meeting you there.

Joe Simpson Jr.:
Hello, my name is Joe A. Simpson Jr. And I’ll be presenting Make All WordPress events accessible at WordCamp Asia 2024 in Taipei, Taiwan. I am so incredibly excited and honored to be presenting. I’ll be joining you from cast California just north of Los Angeles in the beautiful Santa Clarita Valley. Often when we think of WordPress and accessibility, we think of websites, not the physical or virtual spaces where we gather. In this presentation, I’m going to show you the community, how we can make all of our events as open and inclusive and accessible as possible. We’ll take a look at the history of accessibility in terms of the built world and how a group of teenagers who met at a summer camp made a movement that changed the world forever. I’ll share tips on how to plan accessible events. For example, what do you look for when you’re touring a venue?

Are you touring that venue with someone that’s disabled? I’ll also share a checklist on what to look for. We’ll also look at how to build organizing teams with an eye out for accessibility. We’ll talk about how to create welcome and meaning spaces, how to make wayfinding maps and other information to help people get around the venue and come and pass as easily as possible. I’ll show you tips on how to make your website and all of your communications as accessible as possible. I’ll give you tips also on how to make your live stream accessible. My presentations are always interactive. I love the give take between me and the audience. I’d love to hear what accessibility wins you have to offer and so we can have a great dialogue on how to move accessibility forward in our community. Join me, Joe Simpson, March 8th, 2:00 PM CST at WordCamp Asia. I’m so excited to see you and can’t wait to meet you.

Miriam Schwab:
Hi, my name is Miriam Schwab and I’m head of WordPress relations at elementary. I’m going to be speaking at WordCamp Asia in Taipei on the topic of How I Built my WordPress Career while Raising Seven Children. This is going to be quite a personal talk for me. I have mentioned here and there that I’m a mother of seven, but I haven’t really ever delved into it, at least not in a public setting, what it means and how I managed to more or less juggle a very intense and demanding personal life with a very intense and demanding career. Actually, because I founded two WordPress companies, first my agency and then Strati and sold both of them and building and developing a company and products is incredibly demanding, and of course raising seven children is also incredibly demanding. So in my talk, I’m going to be addressing certain techniques and processes that I developed over the years that helped me be more efficient and manage these two aspects of my life.

And also I am going to touch on why WordPress is a really great option for people who have demanding person lives and or just want to be able to give attention to their friends and family in the way that they need and deserve. That’s more or less what the talk is going to cover. It’s a very unique perspective, and I’m not going to be speaking from the angle of this is what anyone should do. Not at all, but we all have our professional side to our lives and we all have our personal side, and it can look many different ways, but I think it’s a challenge for most of us to figure that out. And so hopefully some of the things that I learned doing what I did under very intense circumstances can be helpful to whoever attends my talk. So I hope you’ll come and listen and of course, I love it when people ask me questions. I’m not always going to have an answer to everything because some things just are hard to explain, but I love having a conversation about a lot of things and I’d love to talk to you about this topic. So I hope I’ll see you there and I can’t wait to see you in Taipei at WordCamp Asia.

Paolo Belcastro:
Hey everyone. Paolo Belcastro here, hailing from Vienna, Austria. I’m incredibly excited to join you all in Taipei in March for Work, campe. I will be presenting their recession with the title You’ll Never Be Alone Anymore, Building and Maintaining Work Sites With AI. I will go over all the different ways that AI can be used to improve your craft as a content creator and a site creator, and particularly underline the benefit of using it as a tool to increase the diversity of opinions you consider when writing content. The idea is to use AI to become better at what we do and increase the quality of our content as opposed to the quantity of it. I am truly, truly looking forward to seeing you all there and invite you to come and meet me at 3:00 PM on March eight, for you’ll Never Be Alone Anymore, Building and Maintaining WordPress Sites with AI.

Ricky Blacker:
Hi, my name’s Ricky Blacker and I am going to be doing a talk at WordCamp Asia 2024 this year, and I’m talking about accessibility and the why, the when and how. So in my talk, I’m going to be sharing a lot of things from my perspective on why this is important and how to go about it. One of the interesting things with it is a time in my life where I really found out about this when I was designing WooCommerce sites and I found accessibility is one of the big things. It’s more than just allowing people to see with disabilities, allowing them to interact with websites. It goes way beyond that. It’s all about everyone being able to access the information on the website and little things like adding the alt tags on your pictures. This is not just for screen readers and or if the image can’t be seen.

This is something that can be picked up by SEO and can really boost your SEO, making sure that those alt tags are properly inserted. Even beyond that. When I was doing the commerce sites, one of the things I found was that even the simple thing is renaming the file name to something descriptive about the picture was massively helpful. And this is accessibility on an even deeper level because I was finding, I was going back and looking for images that I’d maybe uploaded a year or two before and I had a hell of a time finding it because they were labeled things like Image 2000149, and if you’re going back and looking for that image, it’s very hard not knowing what it’s called. So I started labeling even my file names before I uploaded anything into the WordPress media file. I would rename them with something meaningful so it was easy to go back and find them in a year or two years time when I was doing a search because as we know, the media files can grow to quite a number on some of our sites and going back and trying to find it can be a very manual and time consuming task.

So that’s a little hint for you. Hope to see you in Taipei at my talk. Come and see me talk about accessibility, the why, how, and when. And also if you see me around at WordPress, come and say, good day. Thank you very much.

Jeanne Tan:
Hi there. WordCamp Asia attendees. I’m Jeanne and I’m excited to share a powerful strategy that actually works from my lightning talk on how to outrank your competitors with easy on page SEO techniques. Did you know that something as simple as the order of words in a sentence can totally change how your content ranks on Google? For example, search engines interpret the statement, tourists flock to the beach during summer to be different from the beach is flocked by tourists during summer. The first sentence tourists flock to the beach means search engines focus on queries that involve tourists. On the other hand, the beach is flocked by tourists prioritizes content that respond to queries on popular destinations. Tiny tweaks like this make a huge difference, especially if you’re aiming for those featured snippets. I’ll reveal more secrets like this on March 9th to help your content climb the results page. Join me for my session. I’ll be in room 101C for trap four at WordCamp Asia. It’s about time to get technical.

Robert Li:
My is Robert Li, but most people don’t call me Bob. My talk at work campaign of 2024 is called ChatWP Talking to WordPress Generative AI. I’ll be giving an overview of the current and future state of generative AI and probably most interestingly for listeners, we’ll be showing a demo of the chat bot that will rely on the content in your WordPress site with a CoLab notebook and all the resources that attendees can access and trap and sell. This will allow them to build an end-to-end production ready custom open source chat bot with their own WordPress site. I hope to see you all in Taiwan at the talk.

Wes Theron:
Hi, my name is Wes Theron and I’m part of the training team, and I will be joining WordCamp Asia from New Zealand. The name of my session is called Learning Pathways on learn dot WordPress dot org. This is an informational talk about the work we are currently doing to create learning pathways that cater to learners of different roles and skill levels. If you are keen to learn more about this initiative and our plan to redesign the Learn website, join me on the last day to explore learning pathways. We all have WordPress origin and stories and are constantly acquiring knowledge and skills in diverse spheres of life. Our goal is to provide free learning material to empower folks while just starting out with WordPress or who are aiming to achieve a more advanced proficiency. As part of the training team, we are passionate about education. I will leave you with some food for thought. Lifelong education will allow you to banish boredom. And Henry Ford said, anyone who stops learning is old at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. I can’t wait to see all of you in Taiwan. Cheers.

Perth Woratana Ngarmtrakulchol:
Hi everyone, first of all, thanks to Do the Woo podcast for having me. My name is Perth. A quick one about me. I have been using WordPress for 15 years, and I’m currently working as analytics engineer at Canva, the online design software company. In my lightening talk the title is Multiply Your Income Streams With WordPress Development Skills. I will be sharing about how I have monetized my WordPress development skills throughout my career and how I was able to create multiple income streams with these skills to support in my life circumstances. I’ll also give you multiple ideas on how you can also make a living or how you can grow your career from workplace development skills. You’ll be able to take away a list, a thing or two from this talk. For example, did you know that workplace development skills can lead to teaching job in WordPress or web development, which is highly rewarded too. Teaching job will also give you multiple options. You can do one-on-one training. You can do one too many offline training, or you can do the online course, which is basically one to infinity. So if you are a developer or keen to become one, come join me in the session. See you.

Nada ElSharkawy:
Hello. Hello, this is Nada ElSharkawy. I’m a senior marketing manager at GoDaddy and I’m part of the commercial strategy theme. So excited to be speaking at WordCamp Asia 2024. I have a lightning talk under the title, starting a WordPress Meetup, the Highs and Lows.