Introduction
Joe is a very talented developer who devotes considerable time to the WordPress accessibility group and to creating and maintaining outstanding WordPress plugins such as WP Accessibility. He is available @joedolson and provides WordPress and web consulting services at Accessible Web Design.
Shoe Size?
10.5
Pride?
In terms of completed projects, I’m proud of my WP Accessibility plug-in, for what it offers. In terms of incomplete projects, I’m most proud of the push for better exposure of accessibility as regarding themes.
Biggest Challenge?
Effective communication. As an open-source, community-developed project, effective and efficient information sharing is very important. It’s not possible or practical for everybody to keep updated on every aspect of development in WordPress core, let alone elsewhere – so communicating well is crucial – and not something we’ve always done well.
Change Most Needed?
The changes aren’t just something that need to happen in the WordPress community. It’s a change that needs to happen on a far broader stage: if accessibility achieves an equal voice on the stage of web development, that will shift into the WordPress community. But as long as accessibility is not fully mainstream in all web development, it has no chance of making it that far in any community. It comes back, again, to the open source world: the contributors to WordPress all need to buy into accessibility, and understand it as a priority. The only other option is to build WordPress as an open source police state — but that would not be an improvement, as it would also crush the environment of contribution to the ecosystem.