After two successful days (Contributor Day and the first conference day), the last day at WordCamp Europe 2022 has been mainly about networking, sharing our accessibility knowledge and speaking about the future of WordPress. The program of today has inspired us again in different ways! For instance, we gained knowledge about headless WordPress, Agile work processes and various trends.
Nevertheless, we are in Porto with almost the entire team to bring attention to our e-learning platform The A11Y Collective! As a sponsor we have our own stand where we have been busy promoting web-accessibility amongst the WordPress community.
The Future of WordPress
We can state as a fact that the WordPress ecosystem is growing, this is especially visible during WordCamps where the top of the WordPress community comes together. The business acquisitions that are taking place within WordPress hosting, plugin development and full service agencies indicate this as well. As a result of these takeovers, specialists become part of the larger companies, increasing growth and development which we all benefit from. This was discussed during various business talks, focussing on questions such as: what is happening in the market? How does this affect the future of WordPress?
The Web3 ‘buzz’ was also discussed. The development of the ‘new internet’ Web3, based on blockchain technology, gives data owners more power to contribute without losing any rights. The question then arises about how this will affect WordPress in general and the development of the open source movement specifically? For now, in addition to first technical initiatives, this is still just guesswork.
A11Y Collective: Quiz & Superscan your website!
As already mentioned, besides visiting all of the talks and workshops, we also had our own sponsor booth with the A11Y Collective. At our booth, we challenged all designers, developers, product owners, webmasters and editors who already work according to the accessibility guidelines to test their knowledge with our accessibility quiz. And by doing so, they all had a chance of winning some nice AirPods. Also, we offered a quick scan for a website they worked on, so they could learn about possible improvements concerning web accessibility for that specific website. Today again a lot of visitors were interested in the quickscan. So over the course of the event, we analyzed dozens of websites.
We also organized different workshops at our booth. For example, demonstrating how websites (should) function by only using a keyboard. Also, tools like axe DevTools were demonstrated to show how such tools help developers to discover accessibility errors and HTML5 errors.
See you next year!
It was awesome to see that there is a growing population of experts who realize that we have to make the web accessible together and that we all have to make an effort and contribute. This made this trip to WordCamp Europe 2022 in Porto hugely successful for us!
Now we’re going full of enthusiasm to the after party and tomorrow we’re all flying home! We will share our pictures and the aftermovie soon!
Thanks WordCamp Europe!! See you next year in Athens!
Ps. All sightseeing images, dagger movies and the aftermovie are still coming up! 😉🇵🇹
