Dev Blog

At Yoast, we optimize every aspect of websites’ performance. Our goal is to make the web a better place by making websites more usable, easier to navigate, faster, and more reliable. In September 2017 we migrated our webshop from Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) to WooCommerce -- it’s where we sell all the tools, products, and …

In modern web development, building web applications using JavaScript frameworks is a growing trend. And with good reasons, as JavaScript frameworks offer several advantages. However, the shift to a different interaction model creates new accessibility challenges that haven't been fully addressed yet. In this post, I'd like to talk about a fundamental aspect of accessibility: …

The WordPress JavaScript documentation standards have an interesting section about line length. You should wrap your DocBlock text to the next line after 80 characters of text. The reason for this is to make code readable in any editor. Even if the editor doesn't have a build-in wrapping mechanism. There is a simple way to …

Big meetings like WordCamp US are always a good opportunity to get a feel for what has been accomplished during the year. It helps to get an idea of where we're at with general trends in the WordPress community. At WordCamp US this year I've seen people from all over the world sharing ideas, having …

At Yoast, we organize a company-wide user testing session each month. In these sessions, we ask our employees to take a look at a product or feature. On October 12th we focused on user-testing Gutenberg. We did this to gain a better understanding of how different users work with Gutenberg. This knowledge is sure to …

Recently, I joined a conversation where someone said a great part of accessibility is "subjective." While I'd agree that sometimes the perception of accessibility is subjective, there are objective rules. I'm not referring just to the official specifications such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or the ARIA Authoring Practices. There are practical rules every …

Redirects, and in particular redirect loops, can be incredibly hard to troubleshoot. We have a solution for that, called an X-Redirect-By header. It's a simple addition that allows us to find which piece of code is responsible for doing a particular redirect. Yoast SEO already does this and we think every other system in the world …

The aria-current attribute is a new, tiny bit of HTML in the upcoming ARIA 1.1 specification. It's a simple, effective way to communicate to assistive technologies which the current item within a set of related items is. Here, I'll try to explain how such a small attribute can improve your website accessibility. I'll also show how …

In the upcoming weeks, WordPress will choose a UI rendering framework. I’ve heard many claims plugin / theme developers will still be able to use whatever they like, regardless of what WordPress chooses. I think we shouldn’t count on that, nor should we focus on providing interoperability at this point. Instead we should focus first …

I've been focusing on web accessibility for a few years now. One of the complaints I've often heard from business owners and managers is that implementing accessibility is hard and slows down the development process. For this reason, sometimes accessibility gets postponed or set aside in the erroneous belief that's something that can be "added" …