The Cities Project: Building Free Accessible WordPress Themes

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This is a post about the Cities Project. The project is an international effort to increase the number of free WordPress Themes that are accessible to all users. WordPress is a blogging platform used by millions around the world. Joseph Karr O’Connor is leading the Cities Project effort. He will be visiting Berkeley, California to speak about the project on June 11 at noon in room 140 Boalt Hall. Back to Post

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The Law Office of Lainey Feingold’s website is a WordPress site designed and maintained to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AAA Success Criteria. Yet according to Joseph Karr O’Connor, an accessibility advocate and consultant and a WordPress expert, only a handful of themes in the WordPress Theme Directory are accessible to all users. Just four of of 1,747 themes as of April, 2013 designed to be inclusive? Karr O’Connor is out to change those numbers with the Cities Project, an international effort to increase the number of free accessible WordPress themes. Karr O’Connor will be bringing his message to the University of California Berkeley on June 11, and the public is invited to learn more about the collaborative creative effort that is the Cities Project. [Jump to announcement of the June 11 event]

Read a Simplified Summary of this Document, a feature of LFLegal.com designed to meet WCAG Success Criteria 3.1.5 (a WCAG 2.0 AAA Reading Level requirement).

Accessible WordPress Resources

According to Wikipedia, WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, running over 60 million websites worldwide. Accessibility of WordPress is imperative if people with disabilities are to be fully engaged in the significant content available on those websites. Here are some resources to learn more about the Cities Project and WordPress Accessibility.

UC Berkeley June 11, 2013 Event with Joseph Karr O’Connor

The following announcement was distributed by Lucy Greco, the Web Access Analyst at the University of California and chair of the University’s Electronic Accessibility Leadership Team.

Please join Information Services and Technology – API on June 11, 2013 at 12 PM until 1:30 PM in room 140 Boalt Hall. Come ready to take notes and enjoy our most engaging presentation yet. There will be plenty of time for questions so come prepared. We will be recording the event and posting it shortly after.

Greetings to the UC Berkeley IT community and beyond. This year’s Web accessibility presentation at the June Web NetMeeting will be our best yet. Our speaker is a leader in accessibility and web design around the world. Joseph Karr O’Connor better known as accessible Joe is traveling to UC Berkeley to present on beginner Accessible Rich Internet Access (ARIA) and will be giving us a look at his Cities project. Cities is designed to create as many free accessible WordPress themes as possible. I’ve heard him speak many times at a variety of accessibility events and am thrilled to bring him to UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley Information Services and Technology applications platforms integration is the proud sponsor for this year’s event.

About the Speaker

Joseph Karr O’Connor has worked in the California higher education realm for many years. He lives in Santa Monica California and has been creating accessible websites from the beginning of the web accessibility movement. Karr O’Connor has been focused on accessible websites since
the introduction of Section 508 in 1999 for many nonprofits and others. For more information on our speaker and his cities project please visit http://accessiblejoe.com/about/