I recommend using Windows Live Writer for blogging. Windows Live writer allows for the easy insertion of alt tags, by simply clicking link to “url” then adding a url to which the picture can be linked , and a line of text as the “title”, reference is also easily handled so you can chose from tag, enclosure,licence of no follow.

One of my major concerns with Word Press and accessibility is the lack of colour contrast in not only its dashboard, but many of the blog templates. For example, according to tests performed by accessibility keys, some areas of your blog lack sufficient contrast for those with low vision.
http://www.accesskeys.org/tools/color-contrast.html
I find the Word Press Dashboard gives me terrible headaches.

You get something like this when you view the page source later:


<img style="border: 0pt none;" title="I love cherry blossoms!" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/43/122550096_c4d3d760a1_m.jpg" border="0" alt="Cherry tree" width="240" height="133" />Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/katmere


What do you think of that?

Enjoy your boat building ventures, but please continue popping out of retirement. Reading through the Trac ticket on the alt issue, someone with a sound understanding on accessibility and standards is definitely needed to address this and other accessibility issues. Bob, your wisdom, knowledge and guidance are still very much needed!

I am going to look at the places Jane Wells suggested. No promises on action; retirement is awfully busy!

Folks, that’s sounds like a challenge to me! Anyone up for it?

Unfortunately, in open source, if no one volunteers to actually write the code to fix the problem, it takes longer to get done. But, as I mentioned, in the media upload UI work we’re doing now for the next version, the plan is for the fields to be separate, so if no one volunteers to write a patch, one of the core devs will address it.

This is not the only accessibility issue in the WordPress admin. There are other Trac tickets with accessibility issues that have been identified (though not very many, and I’m certain there are more things that must need fixing) that no one has volunteered to patch yet. We’re also starting to bring together a few people who have volunteered to work on an admin theme that will be more accessible for people with certain disabilities (higher contrast, persistent links rather than on hover, larger click targets). If anyone is interested in getting involved in the efforts to improve the accessibility of WordPress, please join the wp-accessibility mailing list. It’s low-volume so far, but hopefully will get more traffic as the admin theme project begins.

Accessibility is very important. So important, in fact, that when errors or issues are found, it should be brought directly to the core team (they don’t tend to have time to read lots of blogs). Discussing it on the accessibility list is one way to get it on the radar. Another is to create a Trac ticket to report the bug/error. It can also be added to the agenda for the weekly core developer IRC chats. This last is an easy way (you just leave a comment on the blog post that says “suggest agenda items for the [date] dev meeting”) to get the issue in front of not only the core devs, but also the most active community contributors.

I love the passion here around improving the accessibility of WordPress, but it needs to be taken a step further to have a more immediate and satisfactory effect. The way to improve an open source project is to get involved, whether it’s through submitting a code patch to fix a problem, or conducting testing to identify the problems in the first place and creating Trac tickets to report them. After reading your post and discovering that the alt tag ticket has been around for almost a year with no volunteers to code the fix, maybe some of your readers will decide that now’s the perfect time to start contributing to the project, so that your next post about this issue can be a celebration of how the community came together to fix the problem.