[ad_1] Christina Deemer [00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the show, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you all your idea featured soon. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there. So, on the podcast today, we have Christina Deemer. Christina is a senior UX developer at Lede, a company of the Alley Group, where she champions accessibility and headless WordPress in her work with publishers and nonprofits. She’s passionate about inclusivity and community and has spoken at a variety of events about the subject. Christina is autistic and brings her personal experience with neurodivergence and disability to bear in her work. At the recent WordCamp US, Christina gave a presentation called “embracing minds of all kinds, making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities”. And it’s this talk, which is the foundation of the podcast today. In her description of the presentation, Christina wrote, “cognitive disabilities are among the most prevalent types of disabilities, yet experts have struggled to provide web accessibility best practices around this area due to cognitive disabilities being such a broad category. However recent work by standards groups has begun to address this deficiency”. In past episodes, we’ve covered website accessibility from some different angles, and today we focus on how the web might be experienced by people with cognitive disabilities. First, Christina talks about what the term cognitive disabilities actually means, and what it encompasses. It’s a wide range of things, and so we talk about how people may differ in the way that they access the web. Memory, over complicated interfaces and readability are a few of the areas that we touch upon. We also discuss what legislation there is in place to offer guidance to those wishing to make their sites more accessible, and as you’ll hear, it’s a changing landscape. Towards the end, Christina talks about her own late diagnosis of autism and how this shapes her experience of the web, particularly with auto-play content and when web design includes elements which flash or flicker. Typically when we record the podcast there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case. This is the last of the live recordings from WordCamp US 2022, and you may notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I do hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links and the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well. And so, without further I bring you Christina Deemer. I am joined on the podcast today by Christina Deemer. Hello. [00:04:14] Christina Deemer: Hello Nathan. [00:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to have you on. We are at WordCamp US 2022. We’re upstairs in the media room, and we’ve got Christina on the show today because she did a presentation. Have you actually done the presentation yet? [00:04:27] Christina Deemer: Yes, I did it yesterday morning. I was lucky in that I got to get it over with early and then enjoy the rest of the conference. [00:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go? [00:04:35] Christina Deemer: It went really well. It was a lot of fun. I had a really great audience. [00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: That’s nice to hear. That’s good. The subject, I’m just gonna give everybody the title. That’s probably a quick way to introduce what we’re gonna talk about. The subject title was embracing minds of all kinds, making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities. So we’ll dive into that in a moment. Just before then, though, just paint a little bit of a picture about who you are and how come it is that you’re speaking at a WordPress conference particularly about this topic. [00:05:04] Christina Deemer: Okay. I am a career changer. I spent the first 12 years or so of my career working in arts management. Then I decided I wanted to do something very different, and I became a developer. And one of my early mentors introduced me to WordPress. So, the first projects that I worked on were WordPress sites. I wrote my first WordPress theme when I was 35, and just really enjoyed getting involved in the WordPress community. And from the beginning of my career, I’ve been very interested in accessibility for a wide variety of reasons. And it’s become a passion of mine. I really enjoy sharing knowledge about accessibility with people. I enjoy hearing people’s stories about accessibility. And recently there’s been a lot of work done on the standards around cognitive accessibility or accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities, and that work has been really fascinating and I’ve wanted to share it with people. And that was how, the reason that I pitched this talk for WordCamp US. [00:06:13] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That’s great. The words cognitive disabilities, it probably makes a great deal of sense to you because you’ve parsed and you’ve said it many times. You fully understand it. Would you just run over a brief definition of what it encompasses? And I’m sure it’s not just one thing, maybe it’s a multitude of things. [00:06:28] Christina Deemer:
Continue readingTag Archives: Making
Making The World A Better Place One Line Of Code At A Time
[ad_1] Este ensayo también está disponible en español. How I Met WordPress It seems like only yesterday that I thought to myself… There have to be a better way to do this? At that time I was working as a designer for a company dedicated to sports and we were working internally on a kind of CMS to digitize our Football News magazine, but the result was horrendous, the interface did not exist, it constantly crashed and it was full of bugs. That’s how in the year 2008-2009 in an Internet search I discovered WP, its version at that time 2.5, I couldn’t get us to use WP as a CMS and the internal solution won. But there was one seed planted. At that time I used WordPress in a very simple way, my background was a graphic designer, I didn’t know anything about PHP, much less about programming, but studying the WP code I was able to make my first themes, which by the way were terrible. I learned HTML and CSS, at the same time I started taking Programming courses, especially in PHP, and that’s how I started this adventure. The first years were literally learning on my own, in my bubble, then I started to add the word web developer in my resume, I found a job in a company as a designer and web master, I designed gif banners, magazine ads, brochures and the website , this company had its page in ASP and since it was very complicated to update it, at least for me, I gave myself the task of migrating it to WordPress, it was 2014 and WP was in version 3.9, this was my first job in which I did everything from the design to the development and programming of the theme, in it I put into practice everything I had learned until then. Community In 2016, I met Roberto Remedios, my tattoo artist who was also his tattoo artist, told him that if didn’t know me?, Costa Rica is a small country where one way or another we all have friends in common, he told him that my passion was WordPress, when we met we didn’t stop talking about how cool it was, but what caught my attention the most was the word Community. Community what was that?, I had spent so many years working on my own that I didn’t know that it even existed, my concept of Open Source was simply something free. Roberto convinced me that same year to go to WordCamp Miami, it was my first camp, meeting the community behind WP was something that impressed me a lot, the talks, the desire to teach and learn from all the participants, and above all to collaborate with the community, wow everything changed for me. When we got back, Roberto and I started talking about the possibility of holding a WordCamp in San José, Costa Rica. Part of that process is giving talks before the camp as a way to promote it, and as a member of the newly founded WordPress Costa Rica group, it was time for me to give a talk. It was the first time I spoke in front of the public since my student days, I remember how nervous I was, my talk revolved around page builders, there was no Gutenberg back then, I managed to get the Meetup sponsored, there were snacks, swags, A lot of people came, it was incredible. Colleagues who participated that day in that Meetup, are still an active part of the community. I gave that same talk at WordCamp and it was even more stressful, because my computer did not turn on, at that moment they lent me a computer, but oh surprise I could not run my test site, after 20min I was able to solve the problem, the JavaScript was disabled. I was already sweating profusely, red with shame, in the end I was able to give the talk and everything ended well. WordCamp San Jose, it was incredible, it was hard work, very rewarding, it was a success, never before had I felt so good professionally, years had passed, without sharing something that I like so much with anyone, suddenly we had a community, we meet regularly, and share about what we are most passionate about. Recently my talks revolve around making my local community aware of new WordPress trends, I collaborate as an administrator of the WordPress Costa Rica group. Outside Costa Rica The second year that I attended WordCamp Miami, I participated as a volunteer, and I had the opportunity to interact with many of the humans that I follow on social media, and then I was encouraged to send talks and participate in the WordCamps that take place in my region. Eager to share what I have learned, to date I have participated as a volunteer, speaker, and organizer in my city Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico and in the first Central American WordCamp which was held online. Then came the talks in another language, I have had the opportunity to give talks in Rome, Italy, I participated as a volunteer in the WordCamp US, where I had the opportunity to meet colleagues and the CEO of a company that I admire a lot, this was in Nashville , U.S. seeing colleagues with whom I have had the privilege of working today, my circle of friends expanded. Also had participate in online conferences, such as GatsbyConf, JavaScript For WordPress and at WordCamp EU 2021. I like to share and talk about JAMStack, especially with GatsbyJS and WordPress as a headless CMS. Professional Path I have a lot to thank WordPress for, the first thing it brought was the curiosity to learn programming, then remote work. I started working for an agency located in Austin, Texas, with several collaborators in Costa Rica, it was the year 2017, they hired me for my knowledge in WordPress, it was not only the first time that
Continue readingElastic Hits Back at OpenSearch, Making Client Libraries Incompatible with Amazon-led Open Source Fork – WP Tavern
[ad_1] After Elastic, makers of the search and analytic engine Elasticsearch, re-licensed its core product so that it was no longer open source, Amazon led a community effort to fork it. In July 2021, contributors to the project announced the first general availability (GA) release of OpenSearch 1.0, an Apache 2.0-licensed fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and Kibana 7.10.2. In what appears to be a slap back at the open source fork, Elastic has begun making its client libraries incompatible with OpenSearch. The Python client was updated to perform an API request that will verify connection to Elasticsearch and raise an error if it doesn’t receive the proper response. The PR received 40 “thumbs-down” reactions from the community and a brief round of criticism before the discussion was shut down. “It’s disappointing to see this,” Invenio product manager Lars Holm Nielsen said. “You’re forcing us as bystanders in a battle to choose sides. We develop an Open Source product that could likely easily work with both Elasticsearch or OpenSearch and then the users can choose for themselves if they want Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. “Now, instead, we likely have to make choice for all our users if we want OpenSearch or Elasticsearch. This and other behaviors from Elastic really does not give me any confidence in Elastic and what you might do in the future. And don’t blame it all on Amazon – you’ve already changed the server license, you didn’t have to make this move.” Elastic Senior Engineering Manager Philip Krauss responded before turning off comments on the discussion. “Amazon OpenSearch is a different product,” Krauss said. “And while there is some shared history, there are already many differences that cause real confusion and issues.” Elastic has also modified its .NET Connector for Elasticsearch to include “a pre-flight check on first use,” which users do not consider to be an enhancement. Elastic Senior Engineer Steve Gordon said the change is not breaking in supported configurations and that the intent was “to make this incompatibility explicit by failing fast to avoid consumers incorrectly assuming they are running in a supported configuration which is not tested and may not function as expected.” Last week, OpenSearch responded to Elastic’s recent changes that render many clients incompatible, by committing to create a set of new client libraries that make it easy to connect applications to any OpenSearch or Elasticsearch cluster: Many developers who use Elasticsearch and OpenSearch in their applications also make use of the open source client libraries maintained by Elastic, which provide convenient high-level interfaces for several popular programming languages. Over the past few weeks, Elastic added new logic to several of these clients that rejects connections to OpenSearch clusters or to clusters running open source distributions of Elasticsearch 7, even those provided by Elastic themselves. While the client libraries remain open source, they now only let applications connect to Elastic’s commercial offerings. OpenSearch published a list of a dozen clients for which contributors plan to create forks that will maintain compatibility with all Elasticsearch distributions, even those produced by Elastic. “We do not recommend updating to the latest version of any Elastic-maintained clients, as this may cause applications to break,” OpenSearch maintainers urged users in the latest project update. Elastic’s decision to prevent official clients from working with open source forks has further undermined any remaining goodwill the company had after re-licensing Elasticsearch. “Looks like Elastic has sucked all the benefit they could from open source and is now spitting out the bones,” OSI Director of Standards and Policy Simon Phipps said. 10up, makers of the ElasticPress.io service, one of the most prominent Elasticsearch-powered products in the WordPress ecosystem, is still considering its next move after Elasticsearch abandoned its open source licensing. The company is not in any hurry to choose sides. Vasken Hauri, 10up’s VP of Platforms and Systems, said the dispute “isn’t something that we’re concerned about in the near term (the next 2-3 years).” Upgrading past Elasticsearch 7.11+ would require making a choice between continuing on with Elastic’s proprietary offering or switching to the open source fork. Hauri said that the company is “barely taking advantage of most of the features Elasticsearch offers now” and projects that the current roadmap “could probably run another couple of years without any need to get new features from Elasticsearch.” For the time being, the 6,000+ users of the ElasticPress WordPress plugin and customers of the ElasticPress.io service have nothing to worry about as a result of Elastic’s renewed war with Amazon. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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