The Law Office of Lainey Feingold’s website is a WordPress site designed and maintained to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AAA Success Criteria. Yet according to Joseph Karr O’Connor, an accessibility advocate and consultant and a WordPress expert, only a handful of themes in the WordPress Theme Directory are accessible to all users. Just four of of 1,747 themes as of April, 2013 designed to be inclusive? Karr O’Connor is out to change those numbers with the Cities Project, an international effort to increase the number of free accessible WordPress themes. Karr O’Connor will be bringing his message to the University of California Berkeley on June 11, and the public is invited to learn more about the collaborative creative effort that is the Cities Project. [Jump to announcement of the June 11 event]
Read a Simplified Summary of this Document, a feature of LFLegal.com designed to meet WCAG Success Criteria 3.1.5 (a WCAG 2.0 AAA Reading Level requirement).
Accessible WordPress Resources
According to Wikipedia, WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, running over 60 million websites worldwide. Accessibility of WordPress is imperative if people with disabilities are to be fully engaged in the significant content available on those websites. Here are some resources to learn more about the Cities Project and WordPress Accessibility.
- Joseph Karr O’Connor’s Cities Project Website
- April 2013 Powerpoint presentation about the Cities Project on Slideshare
- Web developer David Kennedy’s post on Joining the Cities Project
- Post about the accessibility of LFLegal. LFLegal, a WordPress site, was designed in 2008 by Mike Cherim. The theme files have been made available to the Cities Project.
- Post on Accessites.org recognized the accessibility of LFLegal
UC Berkeley June 11, 2013 Event with Joseph Karr O’Connor
The following announcement was distributed by Lucy Greco, the Web Access Analyst at the University of California and chair of the University’s Electronic Accessibility Leadership Team.
Please join Information Services and Technology – API on June 11, 2013 at 12 PM until 1:30 PM in room 140 Boalt Hall. Come ready to take notes and enjoy our most engaging presentation yet. There will be plenty of time for questions so come prepared. We will be recording the event and posting it shortly after.
Greetings to the UC Berkeley IT community and beyond. This year’s Web accessibility presentation at the June Web NetMeeting will be our best yet. Our speaker is a leader in accessibility and web design around the world. Joseph Karr O’Connor better known as accessible Joe is traveling to UC Berkeley to present on beginner Accessible Rich Internet Access (ARIA) and will be giving us a look at his Cities project. Cities is designed to create as many free accessible WordPress themes as possible. I’ve heard him speak many times at a variety of accessibility events and am thrilled to bring him to UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley Information Services and Technology applications platforms integration is the proud sponsor for this year’s event.
About the Speaker
Joseph Karr O’Connor has worked in the California higher education realm for many years. He lives in Santa Monica California and has been creating accessible websites from the beginning of the web accessibility movement. Karr O’Connor has been focused on accessible websites since
the introduction of Section 508 in 1999 for many nonprofits and others. For more information on our speaker and his cities project please visit http://accessiblejoe.com/about/