Disclaimer: This post is a bit humble-braggy. You’ve been warned.
People that know me will know that I’m comfortable in my little shell that allows me to do my thing in the background. Like a Roadie (by Tenacious D).
Since finding and fixing my first WordPress bug (told you, humble-brag), I’ve been mainly lurking in Slack and not getting involved very much (mainly time related, to be fair).
Until, in early February, I noticed that the WordPress accessibility team was calling for testers. This has been a catalyst in getting involved more, especially since testing doesn’t need much more than experience with WordPress. Screen reader experience and experience navigating with the web with just a keyboard are nice to have and will allow you to test more. But really, accessibility is more than just that, being able to understand what’s going on and how to interact with WordPress functionality is also a very big part of it. If you’re at all interested in contributing, sign up to become an accessibility tester and get started today!
But I digress.
My testing contributions quickly put me in a place where I could help more, leading to getting more involved in the accessibility meetings, test results, ticket reporting, and ultimately get added to the Make Accessibility blog to help in posting test and meeting summaries.
None of this would have been possible were it not for the awesome Andrea Fercia and Rian Rietveld, who have both been really helpful.
In the mean time, Adam and I have geared up to start writing plugins in our spare time. We finalised the development and got our very first plugin ready for release this week. I’ve used it on my website, and I can obviously recommend it if you’re interested in having your post series organised. You can download it from the Our Post Series Manager plugin on WordPress Plugin Repository.
Where will this go from here? Who knows. More plugins, surely. Hopefully I will also be able to find more time to help Andrea with developing patches for the bugs we find.
But for now, #humblebrag over. Carry on.