Web Accessibility and WordPress: Make the web a better place.
Able Player 5.0.0 is now available! For the most part, it s the same as what I announced last month; with a few additional bug fixes: I also updated the Able Player WordPress plugin to version 2.4.0, with several minor changes:
I officially took over maintenance of Able Player, the accessible media player, on May 6th, 2025 just a little over a year ago. A year has passed, and I feel like it s time for an update on where things stand! From a code standpoint, it s going great! I ve released three major updates so far, and have just published the release candidate for the next major release. I ve made a lot of changes,…
My Calendar Pro v3.4.0 is released! This is a major release, and includes a number of significant changes worth mentioning. Importer Improvements When importing .ics event sources, My Calendar Pro has historically taken each individual occurrence of an event and imported them as separate events. With version 3.4.0, the importer will now insert those occurrences as individual instances of a single…
In two short weeks, I ll be attending the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in Anaheim, California. I ve gone to this conference many times, and I know that it s an amazing opportunity to connect with tons of people who are passionately invested in website accessibility. And during this trip, I m hoping to gather information to help steer the future development of Able Player. I m looking to…
Able Player 4.8.0 is now available! All the details about what s changed in this release are available in my previous post: the Release Candidate announcement and call for translators. This is an exciting release for a few reasons: but most importantly, it s my first steps towards removing the jQuery dependency. jQuery is deeply built into Able Player, so removing that is going to take time but…
Major updates to both My Calendar and My Calendar Pro went out today. The most significant user-facing change is the switch from using a elements for navigation to using button elements for navigation. This only applies if you have AJAX navigation enabled; if you re using page refreshes to navigate My Calendar, the navigation will render as links. This is intended to fix two issues: an…
I m just getting the release candidate for Able Player 4.8 ready. This isn t as large a release as the last one, but it does include some pretty significant changes! The most significant changes are in internationalization and in my progress towards removing jQuery and cookies. The release is currently scheduled for February 2nd, 2026; but could get pushed if there are new bugs in the release…
We tend to agree easily that all accessibility issues are important, but we also acknowledge out of necessity that some issues are more critical than others. What we don t always agree on is how to judge severity. There are very good reasons for that: it s complicated! There s no pretending that figuring out how important something is has an undercurrent of judging who matters more. But that s not…
I m approaching this story from the starting assumption that accessibility overlays are a problem. So I m not going to spend time on arguments for or against the technology. I m also making the assumption that we all agree that the tool itself must be accessible, and won t discuss that question here. I am interested in one key question: where do we draw the line between a potentially useful tool…
The beta release of My Calendar 3.7.0 is ready for testing. This major release includes numerous bug fixes, and a few major changes that would benefit from testing. Breaking Change: Navigation HTML (HyperText Markup Language) changed The My Calendar navigation has historically been a mix of links and forms. This made a lot of sense in the early days of the plugin, when navigation was driven by new…