In this interactive experience, the audience will build empathy and understanding of people with disabilities (PWD) with hands-on activities and simulations. First, we will discuss how people with disabilities use the internet and how we as designers and developers can make websites and apps more inclusive. Once briefed on the ABC’s of accessibility, we’ll delve a little deeper into different personas within the disability community with hands-on activities. You will learn how digital accessibility relates to the specific needs of each persona and how to build understanding into your own workflow.
Whether you’re a seasoned accessibility pro or you’ve never heard of it before, technical or non-technical, you’ll be able to follow along, participate, and gain valuable new knowledge and insight about how to make your digital offerings more inclusive through personas.
Attendees will leave this session with:
- A greater understanding of the specific needs of people with disabilities online
- How to build inclusiveness into your personas and workflows
- Links to valuable tools and resources to use in your own projects
Static sites (or JAMstack sites) are all the rage now. In this talk, I want to discuss why you need to consider Static Site Generators like Gatsby. Are they eating up WordPress’ market share? How can WordPress stay relevant in this age of Gatsby and other SSGs? I will talk about my personal experiences using WordPress with Gatsby.
A few lessons and tips will be shared for anyone deciding to use WordPress as a Headless CMS for their static sites.
Connecting WordPress to the Outside World
Working with WordPress and External APIs
Do you get asked about how to connect WordPress and [insert service] all the time? Want to build your own stable and secure external API integrations? What makes a good integration?
Whether it’s for the enterprise (Salesforce, Marketo), payments (Stripe, currencies, taxes), or other services, the majority of my work is developing external API integrations. I’ll be sharing the lessons I’ve learned over the past 7 years to help you skip some of the pain, guide you around the land mines, and get your integration up-and-running quickly.
We survived GDPRmmagedon and now we’re being warned about aCCPAcalypse 2020 when the California Consumer Privacy Act becomes enforceable on July 1st. Privacy and security are major concerns for consumers and it’s critically important you’re aware of how this law impacts you, your clients, and site users.
In addition to the CA Attorney General prosecuting CCPA violations and issuing fines, the law enables consumers to bring private actions and class action suits; the legal fees and costs to defend CCPA violation suits should be incentive enough to ensure you’re compliant. This expansion of consumers’ privacy rights is a welcome response to the lack of transparency and regulation and massive breaches, sharing, selling, and publication of consumer data. Businesses that properly prepared for GDPR still need to tweak a few things for CCPA compliance but it’s not the terrifying challenge the media is making it out to be.
You still have time to prepare and get your WP site and business, CCPA ready. Rian will provide an overview of: the CCPA, (what you NEED to know), compliance best practices (what you need to DO, administratively and technologically), and resources for maintaining compliance (where you can turn when you need answers), including the WP features developed by the Core Privacy team.
You’re a WordPress professional. And perhaps you lead other WordPress professionals. You’re brilliant on a tight schedule- meeting deadlines with grace and ease. It is your job to keep a bunch of people happy: clients, team members, bosses… other designers, other coders. And what’s that, you’d like you have a personal life?
I’m guessing you’ve heard of burnout. It’s all over the HuffPost twitter feed. Sounds like you might be at risk given all the demands on your time and your brain. Despite being common, burnout is much more than a self-help fad. The way that burnout can effect your brain has major implications for your creativity, productivity, relationships, and overall physical and mental health. But don’t worry… you aren’t doomed to feeling fried, jaded, and apathetic. Forty years of research have helped to clarify some key burnout prevention strategies. In this presentation, Dr. Walling will give you ideas and strategies to help you keep your creative edge, professional cool, and personal sanity.
WordPress is built on a database, but have you ever taken a look at what’s in it? Come take a stroll through the tables and fields in the WordPress database and learn how they work together to make your site.
You might love your website — but does your target market? More importantly, are the people you seek to serve actually converting in terms of your website’s goals?
It’s easy to get caught up in bias when it comes to a project that you’re closely involved with. One way to get around this involves inviting unbiased third parties to try using your website, while narrating their experience. You may be surprised to see the major differences that come to light in terms of what you expected to happen versus how people actually navigate your website.
This process, known as user testing, can quickly become expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. With experience designing websites for 15+ years, UX enthusiast Maddy Osman will provide an actionable process (complete with tool suggestions) for performing user tests on a budget.
WordPress is amazing. It caters to _so_ many people for _so_ many purposes in _so_ many contexts. There is seemingly no limit on what we can create with WordPress! On the flip side, this can be overwhelming to users who just want something simple and easy to use. Free and purchased themes have dozens of ways to customize them, which is a double-edged sword. Now site owners can customize their site in SO many ways without knowing how to code! That’s great… for some. Others experience “overchoice” (aka “choice overload”) that overwhelms, and can lead to “cognitive dissonance” or mental discomfort.
I don’t know about you, but I have plenty of clients that I’ve created WordPress powered websites for that are self-declared “not very tech-savvy”, or very busy–definitely too busy to have to learn something new, or have a high turnover rate of employees/volunteers/interns/etc–with varying levels of technical abilities and/or comfort with the web–that will be managing the site. Most of these clients fit into the latter scenario and simply become frustrated with their website, or abandon it altogether.
Being both a UX designer and a front-end developer, I decided to take this UX challenge into my own hands. With WordPress being open source–as well as the WordPress community being so open and helpful–we have the ability to really truly customize a user’s experience for visitors… but ALSO for the user experience for site owners & writers. Want to know how I do this? Well… I guess you’ll have to attend this talk to find out!
As site owners, it’s impossible for us to serve our users better without knowing a little bit about them — what’s working for them, and what isn’t. There are a number of high-impact but unobtrusive ways to learn more about how users interact with your site and your brand. In fact, you might be surprised at the information you can learn about your users with nothing more than Google Analytics.
This talk will expose some touch points that you can leverage with WordPress to help you learn about your users and how they interact with your site. We’ll discuss tools that move beyond just your analytics platform to help you gain access to these insights, and we’ll walk through some core features of Google Analytics that you may not be aware of.
Leaving this session, you’ll have a better understanding of the types of tracking tools, the information you can glean from them, and how to ensure your data tracking is responsible, transparent, and accessible.
WordPress is a tightly-coupled system, representing over a decade and a half of ideas, decisions, technological shifts, and ideological struggles. There’s a lot of history to be parsed and often the simplest task can have unintended consequences.
Meanwhile, automated testing is one of the best ways to ensure software can be released regularly with high confidence and low risk of regressions. Sadly, the leap from “building WordPress plugins” to “building WordPress plugins with tests” is often viewed as a challenging hurdle. Luckily, there are tools to set up a test harness within an existing codebase with ease.
This talk introduces the fundamentals of automated testing, especially within the context of WordPress. After developing an understanding why automated testing is so critical, attendees will learn how to begin testing their plugins and themes, using features found both in PHPUnit and the WordPress core testing framework, to build and release quality software.
