Gutenberg Accessibility Costs WordPress the W3C Work
September 25, 2020; 4 Comments
This is a slightly extended version of my Twitter thread.
As the W3C has embarked on a full web property rebuild, its vendor (Studio24) indirectly announced earlier this month that it had dropped WordPress from consideration as a CMS. WPTavern took issue with this yesterday, and Studio24 responded today, (politely) pointing the finger squarely at Gutenberg.
Part of WPTavern’s argument was that the selected platform (Craft CMS) is not open source software (OSS), though WordPress itself is not completely open source in practice (Slack versus IRC or MatterMost being the easiest example). More importantly, Gutenberg itself was not truly open source in process — Automattic drove it as a business decision reaction to the growth of Wix, Weebly, and SquareSpace.
Studio24 cited accessibility as the deciding factor. Automattic has already signaled accessibility is not a priority for it or its investment in Gutenberg. The community had to crowd-fund an audit, all while Gutenberg was pushed to final public release with dozens of known accessibility issues. The entire time, all the accessibility work was done by volunteers, not supported by Automattic’s $3 billion bulk in any meaningful way.
As Gutenberg works to replace some common [...]