October 11, 2024 — WordPress isn’t just for websites and blogs. It’s a powerful CMS that can serve as the backbone of complex web applications, portals, and intranets. Using WordPress saves development time on the backend, allowing you to focus on crafting front-end experiences that guide users through complex processes like applying to receive government services, requesting medical records from a doctor, or requesting a nurse to start an IV at a hospital.

In this session, speakers Amber Hinds and Steve Jones will share lessons from building multiple enterprise WordPress portals and present a case study of designing and developing a portal for Nurse Pro Plus, an on-demand IV services company fulfilling requests at hundreds of hospitals across 12 states.

The portal leverages WordPress’ data structure, user management system, and key plugins to power its backend admin. The front end is an accessible Vue.js application that enables hospital representatives to order IV services, notifies available contract nurses, and allows one to pick up and fulfill the order. Essentially, it’s Uber for nurses.

Attendees will leave inspired to reimagine WordPress as more than just a website builder, but as a key tool for building sophisticated web applications. Takeaways will include helpful plugins when building portals, specific considerations for accessibility, security, and UX, and ideas for overcoming challenges when building WordPress-powered web applications.

October 10, 2024 — Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is an accessibility testing plugin that scans pages and posts for accessibility problems and puts reports in the WordPress admin. It was a winner of a 2023 Gaady award for its innovative approach to improving accessibility (fellow winners were Unilever and Studio 24), and is used by enterprise organizations, educational institutions, small businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies around the world, including NASA and The US Department of Veterans Affairs, among others.

Accessibility Checker was created to make it easier and more affordable for everyone to identify accessibility problems on their website. Competitor solutions rely on API connections and charge per page and per scan, frequently costing tens of thousands of dollars per year. This can easily put accessibility testing out of reach for many website owners. Equalize Digital came up with an innovative way to run accessibility scans on the website’s own server, within WordPress. The free, open source version available on WordPress dot org doesn’t limit the number of posts or pages that can be scanned, allowing even very large websites to start finding and fixing accessibility at zero cost. In this way, Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is democratizing accessibility.

Laws around the world are increasingly requiring accessibility for websites of all types. Accessibility Checker is an ideal tool to showcase as it can help website owners better comply with these laws. Showcasing it may also attract more enterprise organizations to WordPress, as NASA stated that Accessibility Checker was a major contributor to their decision to use WordPress as the CMS for their new website.

January 24, 2024 — In this talk Steve Jones, CTO of Equalize Digital will cover how to implement an accessibility-first approach to WordPress development projects. This ensures a truly accessible digital experience for all users, specifically those with disabilities. WordPress developers have a unique responsibility to take a proactive approach to develop blocks, plugins, and themes that are fully accessible at launch. These products are generally content producing or duplicated on multiple websites throughout the web. With WordPress’ large market share of websites, remedying accessibility issues retroactively can be a daunting and expensive task. Prioritizing the accessibility-first methodology takes accessibility from being a baseline standard to a core project requirement. Moreover, accessibility-first equals people first.

October 13, 2023 — Navigation is the main component of a website when it comes to moving around different pages and finding content. For this reason, it is critical to design and develop accessible navigation. This means keeping those using different devices and assistive technologies such as screen readers in mind.

Accessible navigation is easy to understand, semantic, and adaptive. In this session, Steve will review the best practices to design and develop accessible navigation from start to finish. He’ll also discuss how to replace the navigation in an existing theme.