Accessibility Craft

This episode is a recording of an October 2026 accessibility webinar, brought to you by Equalize Digital. Amber Hinds, CEO, and Chris Hinds, COO of Equalize Digital, share a practical five-step approach to preparing for ADA Title II web accessibility deadlines. Learn how to inventory websites and documents, prioritize barriers, prevent new problems, plan remediation around your team's capacity and budget, and measure meaningful progress. The webinar closes with a six-week action plan and audience Q&A. These events are a 100% free and virtual community resource.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/189

What does it take to make 41 WooCommerce extensions more accessible? James Kemp, Core Product Manager at WooCommerce, joins Amber Hinds and Steve Jones to discuss the work behind 41 Accessibility Conformance Reports, from getting buy-in and prioritizing plugins to coordinating fixes across development teams.

They explore how the European Accessibility Act helped motivate the project, why older plugins can hide unexpected issues, and how public reports help merchants make informed choices. First, they toast the project with Thomson & Scott Noughty Non Alcoholic Sparkling Chardonnay, with a cautious cork opening and mixed reviews.

In this...

This episode is a recording of an October 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this meetup, Courtney Robertson shared a practical case study of running Equalize Digital’s Accessibility Checker Pro across her long-running WordPress site (including a large archive of older posts), then feeding those scan results into Claude Code to automate fixes. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/187.

Is there such a thing as practical accessibility magic?

Inspired by October, Practical Magic, and a “Lime in the Coconut” Milkshake Sour DIPA from Blue Owl Brewing, Amber, Chris, and Steve open their "spellbooks" and dive in... They’re looking for the changes that can make a real difference to a website's accessibility conformance.

Speaking of conformance levels, the conversation begins with the latest WCAG 3 draft. What might replace the familiar A, AA, and AAA conformance levels? How could reporting change? Listen, or read, to find out.

Then, our hosts put accessibility overlays under...

This episode is a recording of an October 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this presentation, Deneb Pulsipher uses a real-world case study—the open-source plugin Polly Alt—to explore how we can ethically leverage generative AI as an accessibility aid by intentionally keeping a human in the loop. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that takes place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/185.

What does it actually take to design a modern, accessible website from the ground up?

In this episode of Accessibility Craft, we’re pulling back the curtain on the Equalize Digital website redesign. We talk about how we selected a design partner, why our original design budget nearly doubled, and how accessibility requirements were built into the process before the first Figma designs ever arrived. We also dig into accessibility QA during the design phase, and Steve shares some early thoughts on how the designs will become a modular, performant WordPress build.

Before all that, we...

This episode is a recording of a September 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this presentation, Maria Maldonado discussed email accessibility and looked at practical examples, including table-based email layouts, links, headings, images, color contrast, readable content structure, and testing workflows. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/183.

WordPress Accessibility Day 2026 is coming October 7–8, and this episode takes you behind the scenes of how its speakers, sessions, and keynote came together.

Ryan Bracey, Director of Web Development and User Experience at Second Melody and Speaker Team Lead for WordPress Accessibility Day, joins Amber and Chris to talk about the hidden work that goes into reviewing 88 speaker submissions, anonymizing proposals to reduce bias, building a diverse schedule, and balancing technical, business, design, and lived-experience perspectives.

Ryan also previews some of the sessions he is most excited about, including th...

This episode is a recording of a September 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this presentation, Cam will provide foundational context about WCAG and explain how to slowly and seriously learn WCAG like a professional. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/181.

Special guests Joe Dolson, WordPress core committer and accessibility consultant, and Anne McCarthy, Architecture and Open Source Director at Automattic, join Amber and Steve to talk through the vision behind Accessibility Lab, a new canonical accessibility plugin concept for WordPress core.

We learn what Accessibility Lab is, what it is not, and try to understand what the practical use case is in the dizzying context of one of the world's largest open source projects.

The conversation gets into some genuinely difficult technical territory, including why some accessibility optimizations in WordPress core are particularly difficult to...

This episode is a recording of an August 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this session, Tanveer Khan explored critical accessibility problems that automated tools often miss, including keyboard navigation issues, focus management problems, screen reader usability challenges, dynamic content announcements, and interaction patterns that require human judgment and manual testing. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/179.

In this episode, we take a deep dive into a claim that gets repeated surprisingly often: Accessible websites have better performance.

We look at what recent research says about accessibility and website performance, why the connection feels so intuitive, where accessibility improvements really can improve page speed, and why correlation between the two does not necessarily mean causation. We also flip the question around and discuss how poor website performance can itself create accessibility barriers, particularly for people on slower connections or using assistive technology.

Before that, we unpack the accessibility changes in WordPress 7.1, including 44 ac...

This episode is a recording of an August 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this presentation, Jesse Loesberg will give you an inside look at how the UC Berkeley Library built and implemented a digital accessibility program following a Title II ADA lawsuit and a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/177.

How is AI actually changing the way people use assistive technology, and what happens when AI lets developers move faster than they can realistically review their own work?

In this episode of Accessibility Craft, Chris is joined by DevOps engineer and accessibility consultant Alex Stine, along with returning guest and Equalize Digital team member William, for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, accessibility, screen readers, coding agents, and the growing tension between speed and reliability. Alex shares firsthand examples of using AI to make inaccessible PDFs, charts, weather data, and other visual information more usable in his own...

This episode is a recording of a July 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this practical session, veteran #WPA11yMeetup presenter Samantha Merrett worked through how to remediate a PDF step by step. You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of PDF accessibility and the confidence to start improving your own documents. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/175.

Automated accessibility testing is important, but it cannot tell you whether real people can successfully use your website. In this episode of Accessibility Craft, Amber, Chris, and Steve explain how manual accessibility testing fills the gaps left by automated tools and share practical tests that anyone can begin performing today.

The conversation covers keyboard navigation, browser zoom, screen reader testing, dynamic components, focus management, heading structure, and the accessibility problems that automated scanners frequently miss. The hosts also examine several developments from Converge Accessibility’s June 2026 legal update, including a case that demonstrates why documenting ongoing accessibility wo...

This episode is a throwback recording of a 2024 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. During this session, senior developer and accessibility advocate Nick Croft explored what he called the six stages of the accessibility journey. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/173.

This week on Accessibility Craft, we're taking a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of the new Issues Explorer in Accessibility Checker Pro. We discuss what it takes to build an accessible single page application (SPA), how React changes the accessibility testing process, and why focus management, live announcements, and state changes are critical to creating a great experience for keyboard and screen reader users.

We also share what we learned while updating Accessibility Checker's Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR), how AI fit into the design and development process without replacing human expertise, and why accessibility remains...

This episode is a recording of a June 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this session, Chris Hinds, COO at Equalize Digital, shares a practical, agency-focused approach to website accessibility. From developer tools like automated scanners and linters to larger strategic decisions like rebuilds versus retainers, this session is packed with actionable ways to improve both user experience and business outcomes. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/171.

In this episode of Accessibility Craft, Amber and Chris sit down with Roger Rowles of Made Right Media to talk about what it really looks like for a digital agency to level up its accessibility practices. Roger shares how his team moved from early accessibility assumptions and overlay reliance toward a more thoughtful, proactive, and client-centered approach.

The conversation covers how agencies can introduce accessibility without making it feel like an upsell, how to position remediation and rebuilds with legacy clients, why accessibility is an ongoing practice rather than a one-time checkbox, and...

This episode is a recording of a May 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. Maria Maldonado, Accessibility Specialist at Equalize Digital, broke down the fundamentals of web accessibility in clear, non-technical terms and highlighted simple fixes you can start implementing right away. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/169.

In this episode of Accessibility Craft, Amber, Chris, and Steve talk through the National Federation of the Blind’s lawsuit challenging the delay of federal web accessibility protections, and what six months of real-world accessibility remediation looked like on a large WordPress site built with Oxygen Classic.

The conversation covers the practical impact of ADA Title II and HHS deadline delays, why organizations should not treat extensions as a reason to pause accessibility work, and how a large healthcare-related WordPress site went from more than 26,000 automated issues to under 3,500 through steady remediation work.

Then the te...

This episode is a recording of a May 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. Nora Guy (CPACC) took us on a storytelling adventure through the world of digital accessibility. Using the characters and themes of Pixar’s Up to guide you, Nora explained her “secret sauce” for helping ensure good UX. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/167.

WordPress 7.0 is here, and this episode of Accessibility Craft dives into what changed, what accessibility improvements made the release, and why the new admin color updates sparked so much debate in the WordPress community.

Amber, Chris, and Steve recap the team’s GAAD 2026 Contributor Day work, including accessibility-ready theme testing, Gutenberg improvements, new automation tooling, and Core accessibility updates.

They also dig into practical WordPress 7.0 highlights like improved tab behavior, better media modal keyboard interaction, IPTC alt text imports, decorative image handling in the Image block, and the new AI layer that has developers asking se...

This episode is a recording of an April 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. This session, presented by Donata Stroink-Skillrud, President of Termageddon, discussed drafting an internal Accessibility Support Policy, including what the Policy should state and how to communicate it to your staff. In addition, she shares best practices for training your staff to provide accessible support. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/165.

Digital accessibility work is changing fast as AI coding tools become more common, but better automation does not always mean better outcomes. In this episode of Accessibility Craft, Amber and Steve talk with Skyler Young and David Botos from Connect 211 about what it takes to make complex public-service platforms accessible, how human-reviewed accessibility audits can make AI remediation more effective, and why thoughtful developer workflows still matter.

Everyone also tastes Athletic Brewing’s Ripe Pursuit Radler, a bright, lemon-forward non-alcoholic drink that sparks a surprisingly deep beverage discussion about beer, soda, mocktails, and po...

This episode is a recording of a April 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. The European Accessibility Act requires a number of things beyond technical accessibility to WCAG/EN 301 549 guidelines. Bet Hannon explains what compliance requires and how to start preparing. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/163.

In this episode of Accessibility Craft, the team dives into the newly released WebAIM Million 2026 Report and what it reveals about the current state of web accessibility. From rising error counts to surprising CMS rankings, the conversation explores whether the industry is actually improving and what’s driving the trends. The discussion also connects these insights to Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and how individuals and organizations can take meaningful action.

Along the way, Amber, Chris, and Steve sample a bold craft beverage: Great Notion Triple Berry Shake, a tart ale packed with berry f...

This episode is a recording of a March 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this talk, Niharika reframed accessibility as a frontend architecture concern and a leadership responsibility, not just an individual skill or compliance task. Niharika looked at how accessibility outcomes are shaped by architectural decisions and why fixing issues after implementation leads to recurring accessibility debt. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/161.

Is your website at risk from your own content team? In this episode of Accessibility Craft, we unpack a surprising legal development in accessibility lawsuits and explore a growing concern for organizations: how content creators, not just developers, can introduce accessibility issues and legal exposure. Along the way, the team debates governance, training, and permissions in WordPress, and how to future-proof your site in an AI-driven world. 

In an Accessibility Craft first, we taste... Water!  Specifically, a premium bottled water from Portugal, Healsi, and give our honest take on if it actually tastes any better than what co...

This episode is a recording of a March 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. Ever wondered what actually goes into a professional accessibility audit? Looking for tips to include in your own auditing process? In this session, Amber Hinds, CEO of Equalize Digital, pulled back the curtain on the real-world process her team uses to audit web pages for accessibility. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full transcript, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/159.

In this episode of Accessibility Craft, the team dives into the high-stakes world of digital accessibility compliance as the ADA deadline for state and local governments rapidly approaches. With the April 24th cutoff looming for larger jurisdictions, the discussion centers on the massive challenge of remediating public documents, specifically public meeting agendas and minutes. They explore how traditional PDF workflows often create barriers for users with disabilities as the norm and not the exception, and discuss why some are choosing to pull information offline rather than face the complexities of remediation.

While navigating th...

This episode is a recording of a February 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. At this event, the UK Ministry of Justice Senior Accessibility Specialist Samantha Merrett walked everyone through what it really takes to create digital documents that are accessible in the real world, not just in theory. Instead of focusing only on rules or checklists, she shared practical tips that participants could start using right away, helping them better understand why document accessibility matters for both compliance and inclusion. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom w...

Welcome to episode 156 of the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin.

In this episode, the team explores a startling trend surfacing in 2026: a massive spike in pro se accessibility lawsuits fueled by artificial intelligence. While AI tools have helped democratize knowledge and skills in some ways, they are now being used to automate legal filings against businesses for AD...

This episode is a recording of a February 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this live WordPress accessibility remediation, Amber and Brian continued improving the accessibility of Brian’s podcast website, webmasters.fm. They identified common accessibility issues using both automated and manual testing tools, explained why these issues matter to users with disabilities, and demonstrated how to resolve them directly in the WordPress editor or through code. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

For show notes and a full tra...

Welcome to episode 154 of the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin.

In this episode of Accessibility Craft, the team debates how to balance accessibility, brand identity, and platform consistency. The conversation centers on a significant UI refactor for the Accessibility Checker plugin, and the upcoming release of WordPress 7.0 with its new default color palette.

...

This episode is a recording of a January 2026 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. Screen reader testing is important, but the barrier to entry is fairly high: before you can test with a screen reader, you have to know how to use a screen reader. Wrapping your mind around all those keystrokes and what they do can be difficult. Deneb and Kosi break it down for you and show you how to use the free screen reader of your choice to go through their Screen Reader Ropes Course. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual c...

Welcome to episode 152 of the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin.

Accessibility Craft returns for Episode 152 with a brand new look and a deep conversation about the weight of being an expert. This week, we explore the internal and external pressures of maintaining a perfect accessibility record in an industry known calling out digital failures. We also discuss...

This episode is a recording of a December 2025 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, brought to you by Equalize Digital. In this live, hands-on session, Brian Coords joined Amber Hinds to walk through real-world accessibility remediation on an active website, Brian’s own podcast site, webmasters.fm. Rather than relying on contrived examples or intentionally broken demos, the session centered on practical fixes applied directly to a production WordPress site, giving attendees an authentic look at how accessibility work happens in real projects. WordPress Accessibility Meetups are a 100% free and virtual community resource that take place via Zoom webinars twice a month.

Welcome to episode 150 of the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin.

Can accessibility improvements really generate ROI for a software company? Taylor Walden shares the inside story of LearnDash’s accessibility journey, and how tackling accessibility-related technical debt led to some pretty impressive results that grew their bottom line. If you want to know what those results were, you'll have to...