Hallway Chats

Sharing stories and building belonging

Hallway Chats is a business podcast hosted by Topher DeRosia, with 182 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Topher DeRosia hosts Hallway Chats, a business show with 182 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Hallway Chats

  Episode 182 – A Chat With Russell Aaron

  Jun 5, 20261h 11m

  Introducing Russell Aaron I didn’t learn WordPress at a fancy college or career academy. I graduated from the University of YouTube. My internship was the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Vegas. The rest I learned building mortgage company platforms, working for casinos, inside managed WordPress hosts, and at some of the best WordPress development and support shops on the planet. Show Notes For more on Russell, check out his website: https://russellenvy.com Transcript: Topher DeRosia: All right. Here we go. Hey folks. Russell Aaron: And three, two, one. Topher DeRosia: Hey folks. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, and I’m here with Russell Aaron. I assume I pronounced that right, because it’s not that hard, but you never know. Russell Aaron: You know, so many people call me Aaron. They’ll tag me and they go, “Thanks, Aaron.” And I’m like, “You know, it’s Russell, but it’s cool.” Topher DeRosia: Yeah, nice. All right. Well, I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from you talking about podcasts having the same people on episodes all the time. I thought, “Oh, I gotta have that guy on my podcast.” Because then you can’t go on any other ever again, because then you’ll be that guy. Russell Aaron: Maybe.  Topher DeRosia: So, I snooped a little. You live much closer to me than I expected. Have we met? Did we meet at a WordCamp? Russell Aaron: I think we met at WordCamp Ann Arbor one year. Topher DeRosia: Oh, okay. I went to a whole bunch of those. Russell Aaron: Yeah. I think I spoke 2018, something like that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I was probably there. Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: All right. So tell me where you live, what you do, all that kind of stuff. Russell Aaron: I currently reside in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I am just freelancing as of right now. You know, I live in a pretty small town where it’s kind of old school WordPress, if you will. Anyone who is worth their salt keys will remember a day when websites were not responsive or a business has a cousin of a friend of a brother who builds websites and, “Hey, he’s working on it,” and three years later, there’s still no new website. I kind of live in a town where I’m kind of getting back to my grassroots, where I stay up late at night with my insomnia, and I will roll up to a business and I will say, “Your new website can look like this today. If you pay me this much money, I will install it today, and this is your new website.” And it’s got your updated menu, and it’s responsive, and it works on mobile, and we can connect it to AppPresser and make it an app and stuff like that. So I’m kind of reliving the glory days of what I remember WordPress to be. Topher DeRosia: I’m also freelancing right now, sort of by choice, sort of not by choice. Somebody I’m married to would rather I had regular pay and insurance. Russell Aaron: Heard that. Topher DeRosia: Are you in the same boat, or did you do this on purpose? Russell Aaron: I did this on purpose. I was not working for the man, but I was working with some people. I’m over the tiny little granular things that somebody can fire you over. Like they’re watching if your mouse moves or they’re watching if you haven’t logged in. There’s just no more trust, I feel like, in so many cases. And so I know that I can do things better on my own, and I’m going to. Topher DeRosia: I have to admit, I love the freelance life. It is pretty special. Russell Aaron: Right. It’s almost like… what’s that movie? The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where they are making a website and they’re like, “Hey, Spider-Man 3’s on in five minutes. Let’s go watch it.” Like they totally ignore their job and they just go watch this movie now. It’s kind of like that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah. For me, it’s doing stuff with my wife. She has a day job, but it has kind of chaotic hours and not specific days of the week. And so I work when she does, which sometimes is Saturday and Sunday, and then I just don’t on Tuesday and Thursday. That’s pretty great. Russell Aaron: I’m kind of in the same boat. My wife has a wonderful job, and she is with a great group, and she does global advocacy. I mean, she just deals with people that are happy with the product, and she keeps them happy. She does lots of stuff like that. I’m kind of the same thing, where their company is now starting to get into AI, and they have so many questions, and I’m over here building things with AI and doing things like that. So I’m not exactly consulting, but my ideas are going into their company through my wife. Topher DeRosia: My wife works at a grocery store, and they have a cash machine they use in the back office that runs Linux. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow Topher DeRosia: And the IT guys had to come in and do some work on it, and she saw the screen and she’s like, “Oh, is that Linux?” And I’m like, “Who are you, and what do you know?” Super nerd. So what’s your company name? Do you have one, or is it just WP Pro Support? Russell Aaron: WP Pro Support.  Topher DeRosia: WP Pro Support. Okay. Do you concentrate more on support, or do you build more? Russell Aaron: I have been doing support since 2011. I formed my very first support company, and I launched it the same day that Shane Sanderson launched Maintainn. My buddy, who you might know, John Hawkins, I was at the Vegas WordPress Meetup Group, and I had the idea in Vegas WordPress Meetup Group where there’s 70 people sitting right here behind me and they all want help. And I was like, “How do I do this?” So I built my first thing where I gave everybody free-for-life support, and they were my test group, if you will. And they helped me work out my bugs and tickets, and they helped me work out how I actually operate and do stuff like that. Then when I launched it, literally that day, John goes, “Wait, have you seen this?” And we had no idea about each other, but we literally launched them the same day. Fast forward three years down the road, I ended up working for Maintainn when it was owned by WebDevStudios. But everything I’ve done in WordPress has been support, whether I’ve worked for a mortgage company, a casino in Vegas, hosting with Liquid Web, doing stuff with NerdPress or AppPresser. Everything I’ve done is support. That’s really where my passion is because I remember what it’s like being a first timer. I think that there is a huge market potential here of people are always going to be new. I don’t care who you are. There’s always somebody new walking in the door, and there has to be a person who will sit down and say, “Come here, I’ll hold your hand.” And I am that person. I always try to look at WordPress from that lens is if a new person is looking at this today, are they going to be happy? Are they going to be confused? And I go from there. So currently today I’m transitioning away from support as we know it, where you write a ticket and then somebody on the other end is like, “Hey, I fixed your site,” or whatever. And I’m transitioning to a new product that I’m working on. So I’m going to be getting away from traditional support, but I’m still going to be doing things in the support space, if that makes sense. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that makes sense. When I first got into WordPress, it was 2010, and custom post types were brand new.  Russell Aaron: Right? Topher DeRosia: And I was out of my element with WordPress. I did not know what I was doing, but I did know PHP, and no one else knew post types yet. So when it comes to that, I was on an equal footing, and that was my way in. That was my leverage. I made a lot of money in the early days just building custom post types. Russell Aaron: Custom post types and single-posttype.php or whatever. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: So I was a competent PHP guy who didn’t know WordPress. And I feel like we’re in kind of the same transition space right now with AI, where we have tons of competent WordPressers who don’t really know AI yet. I think there’s a great space for that, teaching our friends, teaching everybody we’ve known for 10 years in WordPress. You know what I mean? Russell Aaron: I do. That’s one of the things that I really love about WordPress is that… let’s take the new 7.0 that just came out, I think it re-leveled the playing field. Before this came out, there were people that were ahead of others when it comes to patterns or blocks or the command palette and stuff like that. But now I think with this, we’re back to an even playing field because every… I mean, not exactly. There’s still some people who know AI a lot better than others, but you’re always five minutes ahead of somebody and five minutes behind somebody else. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. Russell Aaron: But I do think that with 7.0, a new level playing field has come out. And now is the time to start learning, or you got to wait until 7.1 comes out where that new level playing field comes out. But that’s what I love about WordPress is that it continues to happen. Like you said, CPTs. I still love CPTs. I think they’re one of my favorite things. I look at all of these features, you know, page builders, another time when the playing field was leveled again. Now you learn page builders and then shortcodes and then this and then that. I think that’s the one gift that WordPress keeps giving is that you might be out of date six months from now, but then 7.1 comes out and you’re caught right back up. Topher DeRosia: Right. Yeah. And while you’re five minutes ahead, you quick do a WordCamp talk. Russell Aaron: Yes. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: For that long, you know more than other people, right? Russell Aaron: At least it’s on video, right? Topher DeRosia: Right. I was an expert for a minute and a half. Russell Aaron: That was my 15 minutes of fame. Topher DeRosia: What is your WordCamp life like these days? When was the last one you went to? Russell Aaron: The last one I went to was in Vegas, 2018. It was at the Plaza Hotel, which I worked at. When John was putting that together, in Vegas we had a wonderful space, and it was called The Innevation Center, and it was at a data facility called Switch. And they donated so much to us, and we are so grateful to them. And then they kind of had a change in their policy where they weren’t doing things, and then they overpriced how much it would cost to hold events and stuff like that. I was working at a hotel, and so we had this giant convention space, if you will. And so because I was able to pull some strings, we got a great, great discount, all food paid for. I mean, all of it.  So that was my last WordCamp. The after party was on top of a pool deck, and there was pickleball courts, and there was a pool, and there was an open bar. I mean, it was rad. That was my last one.  I have kids now. My kids are seven and eight and so my WordPress travels have slowed. No, I’m sorry. I take it back. WordCamp US last year was my last one, where we went scorched earth. That’s what I call it. I call it WordCamp scorched earth. Topher DeRosia: I was there for that one. I used to go to a lot every year. Go to- Russell Aaron: Five, six? Topher DeRosia: Five and 10. But since COVID, I think maybe just US every year. It’s weird to just go to one. Russell Aaron: It is. And just US, it’s almost like we used to have what I used to call regional events, where I lived in Vegas, I would hit up WordCamp Orange County, then I’d hit up San Diego, then we’d hit up LA, and then we’d make our way up to Portland, and then maybe if San Francisco did one, and then Phoenix. I did all my regional stuff. And then every once in a while I would venture… I mean, I love WordCamp Minneapolis. Love the people up there. Love so much about that event. Used to do that a lot. What’s the one in Ohio that I used to go to?  Topher DeRosia: In the teens, there were five in Ohio. And being in Michigan, I used to just cruise down there.  Russell Aaron: It’s a three-hour, three-and-a-half-hour drive, huh? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: About that. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: At the time, I was working for a company that was paying me to go to WordCamps. I had to make the case for each one, but it was a really simple case for all the Ohio ones because I didn’t need a plane ticket. I just drive over there. It’s like five in Ohio. There was Ann Arbor, there was Detroit, there was Grand Rapids, there was Chicago. I mean, there was almost 10 WordCamps within a three-hour drive of me. Russell Aaron: That’s beautiful. Topher DeRosia: It’s just not there anymore. Russell Aaron: I was very fortunate to work for companies like WebDevStudios, where I could tell them, “Hey, I got into WordCamp Minneapolis. I’m going to speak there.” And because I’m speaking there, they would reimburse me X amount of dollars for something, and then they would sponsor the WordCamp, and then they would make a thing out of it. I mean, I was very fortunate in being able to do that. Then I worked with a really great company called NerdPress, and they are a fantastic group of people that do the same thing. And then I ventured out into different straits, and it was very much different. I’ll say that much. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Those are good times. Russell Aaron: It’s almost like… the way that I put it is it’s like we all graduated. We all did our four years of college, we all graduated, and now we went to our temp jobs or we went to our internships. Like the band broke up. Topher DeRosia: Yep. Yeah, it is a lot like that. I have seen generations of WordPressers. There was all the crew before 2010 that were downloading zip files and hacking themes to even get them to run. Then there was after 2010, and custom post types were new and stuff. And then there’s the whole Gutenberg generation that never experienced all that crazy theme stuff. Russell Aaron: I mean, you tell people that child themes were so new that people didn’t even grasp the concept of a child theme, and today it’s so baked in. It’s not even something that people think about. It’s just you install this and the child theme, and it’s a thing. But I remember writing those by hand.  Topher DeRosia: Yeah. No kidding. Then to a certain extent, not even having child themes anymore because nothing is stored on the file system. Russell Aaron: I love it. I love it. In my very first WordCamp talk in Vegas 2012, I made a prediction that everything was powered by the theme. Everything used to… I mean, that’s as far as I go back is every template was the same. It was left column, right sidebar, header, and every page, whether you liked it or not, looked like a blog post. And it wasn’t full-width, responsive. I remember a lot of that. And then corporate themes came out, and then cupcake themes came out, then lawn company themes came out, and then the rise of Envato and stuff like that. That’s a good name for a band, The Rise of Envato. Topher DeRosia: I’d go see them. Russell Aaron: But all that stuff comes out. And then you look at it now and it’s like, that seems so far away. I still remember the day that I learned about child themes, and I’ve never forgotten that. And I think, coming back full circle, that’s why I stay in this beginner support space because I’m kind of keeping that nostalgia around, I guess. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. There’s a lot of joy in watching people’s eyes light up when they get it. Russell Aaron: That’s the best part is just telling people what’s possible. When they’re frustrated with something and you go, “Oh, hey, Gravity Forms can do that.” And they’re like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And they can also do… And I just start naming stuff. And I show all 50 extensions that they have and they’re just like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “This starts getting radical when you’re into it.”  Topher DeRosia: There’s something I miss from old WordPress that I don’t see in modern WordPress. It might not be a thing. And that is dramatic new styling with a theme the instant you install it. My wife is not a computer person and does not care about computers. She loves design stuff. There was a time we used Winamp. Russell Aaron: Wow. Topher DeRosia: And she loved getting skins for Winamp. And she would download 30 in a day and try them all out. And then when I set her up for the blog the first time and showed her the theme repo on .org, this is in 2011, she would literally spend a day just downloading theme after theme after theme. Russell Aaron: Same way. Topher DeRosia: And you just install it and poof, your site looks amazingly different. These days, I mean, you install something like Kadence or GeneratePress or Ollie or any of them, really, and it’s kind of a blank canvas. Russell Aaron: It’s very minimalist. It’s very minimalist. Topher DeRosia: I miss the ability to say, “I feel like making a change today,” and two minutes later, your site looks completely different because you’re using… Russell Aaron: Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. I mean, I look back at old pictures from when I would host the meetup group in Vegas, and there’s pictures of me talking, and then on the screen behind me is my old site, and it was this old layout. I bought the theme from Envato because I was just fascinated with it. It was everything that I wanted it to look like. But same thing is now when you change your theme from this one to that one, that dark grunge kind of thing is gone, and now you’ve got this bootstrap-looking thing or whatever. I agree with you. I think that comes from my days of being in MySpace. That’s how I got started with all this. So you could change your MySpace template like that, and I think that’s where it comes from, at least for me. Topher DeRosia: I haven’t even looked into it. Can you make a Gutenberg-based blog theme that has a very striking look and just release it? And then, I don’t know, just release a whole bunch of them like in the old days? Theme shops had 35 themes for sale, and they all looked different because they were all totally different themes. Russell Aaron: I remember there was a day on Envato where it was the same theme, it was just rebranded. So it was like theme name 1.0, and it was called Atlas. And then it’s the same theme but in orange, and now it’s 1.2, and it’s called Dungeon or something. And then we have 1.3 again. Same theme, same framework, but each version was named something different. It made that developer look like they had five different products instead of just one over and over. Now you look at something like a page builder, and it’s like, “We’ve got 500 different templates in one thing.” I can’t do that. I think that’s too much for me. Topher DeRosia: It’s like the days of the CSS Zen Garden. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: HTML is the same, CSS changes. Before I used WordPress, I built my own blog system. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Topher DeRosia: It never got super advanced, but I used it for 10

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #181

  Episode 181 – A Chat With Rob Ruiz

  Jan 5, 202654 minS2

  Introducing Rob Ruiz Meet Rob Ruiz, a seasoned Senior Full Stack Developer with nearly two decades of expertise in WordPress innovation and open-source magic. As the Lead Maintainer of WP Rig since 2020, Rob has been the driving force behind this groundbreaking open-source framework that empowers developers to craft high-performance, accessible, and progressively enhanced WordPress themes with ease. WP Rig isn’t just a starter theme—it’s a turbocharged toolkit that bundles modern build processes, linting, optimization, and testing to deliver lightning-fast, standards-compliant sites that shine on any device. Show Notes For more on Rob and WP Rig, check out these links: LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcruiz WP Rig Official Site: https://wprig.io GitHub Repository: https://github.com/wprig/wprig Latest Releases: https://github.com/wprig/wprig/releases WP Rig 3.1 Announcement: https://wprig.io/wp-rig-3-1/ Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher DeRosia, and with me today I have- Rob Ruiz : Rob Ruiz. Topher: Rob. You and I have talked a couple of times, once recently, and I learned about a project you’re working on, but not a whole lot about you. Where do you live? What do you do for a living? Rob: Yeah, for sure. Good question. Although I’m originally from Orlando, Florida, I’ve been living in Omaha, Nebraska for a couple of decades now. So I’m pretty much a native. I know a lot of people around here and I’ve been fairly involved in various local communities over the years.  I’m a web developer. Started off as a graphic designer kind of out of college, and then got interested in web stuff. And so as a graphic designer turned future web developer, I guess, I was very interested in content management systems because it made the creating and managing of websites very, very easy.  My first couple of sites were Flash websites, sites with macro media Flash. Then once I found content management systems, I was like, “Wow, this is way easier than coding the whole thing from scratch with Flash.” And then all the other obvious benefits that come from that.  So I originally started with Joomla, interestingly enough, and used Joomla for about two or three years, then found WordPress and never looked back. And so I’ve been using WordPress ever since. As the years have gone on, WordPress has enabled me to slowly transition from a more kind of web designer, I guess, to a very full-blown web developer and software engineer, and even software architect to some degree. So here we are many years later. Topher: There’s a big step from designer to developer. How did that go for you? I’m assuming you went to PHP. Although if you were doing Flash sites, you probably learned ActionScript. Rob: Yeah. Yeah. That was very convenient when I started learning JavaScript. It made it very easy to learn JavaScript faster because I already had a familiarity with ActionScript. So there’s a lot of similarities there. But yeah. Even before I started doing PHP, I started learning more HTML and CSS. I did do a couple of static websites between there that were just like no content management system at all. So I was able to kind of sharpen my sword there with the CSS and HTML, which wasn’t particularly hard. But yeah, definitely, the PHP… that was a big step was PHP because it’s a proper logical programming language. There was a lot there I needed to unpack, and so it took me a while. I had to stick to it and really rinse and repeat before I finally got my feet under me.  Topher: I can imagine. All right. So then you work for yourself or you freelance or do you have a real job, as it were? Rob: Currently, I do have a real job. Currently, I’m working at a company called Bold Orange out of Minneapolis. They’re a web agency. But I kind of bounce around from a lot of different jobs. And then, yes, I do freelance on the side, and I also develop my own products as well for myself and my company. Topher: Cool. Bold Orange sounds familiar. Who owns that? Rob: To be honest, I don’t know who the owners are. It’s just a pretty big web agency out of Minneapolis. They are a big company. You could just look them up at boldorange.com. They work for some pretty big companies. Topher: Cool. All right. You and I talked last about WP Rig. Give me a little background on where that came from and how you got it. Rob: Yeah, for sure. Well, there was a period of time where I was working at a company called Proxy Bid that is in the auction industry, and they had a product or a service — I don’t know how you want to look at that —called Auction Services. That product is basically just building WordPress sites for auction companies.  They tasked us with a way to kind of standardize those websites essentially. And what we realized is that picking a different theme for every single site made things difficult to manage and increase tech debt by a lot. So what we were tasked with was, okay, if we’re going to build our own theme that we’re just going to make highly dynamic so we can make it look different from site to site. So we want to build it, but we want to build it smart and we want to make it reusable and maintainable. So let’s find a good framework to build this on so that we can maintain coding standards and end up with as little tech debt as possible, essentially.  That’s when I first discovered WP Rig. In my research, I came across it and others. We came across Roots Sage and some of the other big names, I guess. It was actually a team exercise. We all went out and looked for different ones and studied different ones and mine that I found was WP Rig. And I was extremely interested in that one over the other ones. Interestingly enough- Topher: Can you tell me why over the other ones? Rob: That’s a great question. Yeah. I really liked the design patterns. I really liked the focus on WordPress coding standards. So having a system built in that checked all the code against WordPress coding standards was cool. I loved the compiling transpiling, whatever, for CSS and JavaScript kind of built in. That sounded really, really interesting.  The fact that there was PHP unit testing built into it. So there’s like a starter testing framework built in that’s easy to extend so that you can add additional unit tests as your theme grows. We really wanted to make sure… because we were very into CICD pipelines. So we wanted to make sure that as developers were adding or contributing to any themes that we built with this, that we could have automated tests run and automated builds run, and just automate as much as possible. So WP rig just seemed like something that gave us those capabilities right out of the box. So that was a big thing. And I loved the way that they did it.  Roots Sage does something similar, but they use their blade templating engine built in there. We really wanted to stick to something that was a bit more standard WordPress so that there wasn’t like a large knowledge overhead so that we didn’t have to say like, okay, if we’re bringing on other developers, like junior developers work on it, oh, it would be nice if you use Laravel too because we use this templating engine in all of our themes. We didn’t want to have to worry about that essentially. It was all object-oriented and all that stuff too. That’s what looked interesting to me. We ended up building a theme with WP Rig. I don’t know what they ended up doing with it after that, because I ended up getting let go shortly thereafter because the company had recently been acquired. Also, this was right after COVID too. So there was just a lot of moving parts and changing things at the time.  So I ended up getting let go. But literally a week after I got let go, I came across a post on WP Tavern about how this framework was looking for new maintainers. Basically, this was a call put out by Morton, the original author of WP Rig. He reached out to WP Tavern and said, “Look, we’re not interested in maintaining this thing anymore, but it’s pretty cool. We like what we’ve built. And so we’re looking for other people to come in and adopt it essentially.”  So I joined a Zoom meeting with a handful of other individuals that were also interested in this whole endeavor, and Morton reached out to me after the call and basically just said, “I looked you up. I liked some of the input that you had during the meeting. Let’s talk a little bit more.” And then that eventually led to conversations about me essentially taking the whole project over entirely. So, the branding, the hosting of the website, being lead maintainer on the project. Basically, gave me the keys to the kingdom in terms of GitHub and everything.  So that’s how it ended up going in terms of the handoff between Morton and I. And I’m very grateful to him. They really created something super cool and I was honored to take it over and kind of, I don’t know, keep it going, I guess. Topher: I would be really curious. I don’t think either of us have the answer. I’d be curious to know how similar that path is to other project handoffs. It’s different from like an acquisition. You didn’t buy a plugin from somebody. It was kind of like vibes, I guess. Rob: It was like vibes. It was very vibey. I guess that’s probably the case in an open source situation. It’s very much an open source project. It’s a community-driven thing. It’s for everybody by everybody. I don’t know if all open source community projects roll like that, but that’s how this one worked out.  There was some amount of ownership on Morton’s behalf. He did hire somebody to do the branding for WP Rig and the logo. And then obviously he was paying for stuff like the WPrig.io domain and the hosting through SiteGround and so on and so forth. So, we did have to transfer some of that and I’ve taken over those, I guess, financial burdens, if you want to think of it like that. But I’m totally okay with it. Topher: All right. You sort of mentioned some of the things Rig does, compiling and all that kind of stuff. Can you tell me… we didn’t discuss this before. I’m sitting at my desk and I think I want a website. How long does it take to go from that to looking at WordPress and logging into the admin with Rig? Rob: Okay. Rig is not an environment management system like local- Topher: I’m realizing my mistake. Somebody sends me a design in Figma. How long does it take me to go from that to, I’m not going to say complete because I mean, that’s CSS, but you know, how long does it take me to get to the point where I’m looking at a theme that is mine for the client that I’m going to start converting? Rob: Well, if you’re just looking for a starting point, if you’re just like, okay, how long does it take to get to like, okay, here’s my blank slate and I’m ready to start adopting all of these rules that are set up in Figma or whatever, I mean, you’re looking at maybe 5 minutes, 10 minutes, something like that. It’s pretty automated. You just need some simple knowledge of Git.  And then there are some prerequisites to using WP Rig. You do have to have composer installed because we do leverage some Composer packages to some of it, although to be honest, you could probably get away with not using Composer. You just have to be okay with sacrificing some of the tools the WP Rig assumes you’re going to have. And then obviously Node. You have to have Node installed.  A lot of our documentation assumes that you have NPM, that you’re using NPM for all your Nodes or your package management. But we did recently introduce support for Bun. And so you can use Bun instead of NPM, which is actually a lot faster and better in many ways. Topher: Okay. A lot of my audience are not developers, users, or light developers, like they’ll download a theme, hack a template, whatever. Is this for them? Am I boring those people right now? Rob: That’s a great question. I mean, and I think this is an interesting dichotomy and paradigm in the WordPress ecosystem, because you’ve got kind of this great divide. At least this is something I’ve noticed in my years in the WordPress community is you have many people that are not coders or developers that are very interested in expanding their knowledge of WordPress, but it’s strictly from a more of a marketing perspective where it’s like, I just want to know how to build websites with WordPress and how to use it to achieve my goals online from a marketing standpoint.  You have that group of people, and then you have this other group of people that are very developer centric that want to know how to extend WordPress and how to empower those other people that we just discussed. Right? Topher: Right.  Rob: So, yeah, that’s a very good question. I would say that WP Rig is very much designed for the developers, not for the marketers. The assumption there is that you’re going to be doing some amount of coding. Now, can you get away with doing a very light amount of coding? Yes. Yes, you can. I mean, if you compare what you’re going to get out of that assumed workflow to something that you would get off like Theme Forest or whatever, it’s going to be a night and day difference because those theme, Forest Themes, have hours, hundreds, sometimes hundreds of hours of development put into them. So, you’re not going to just out of the box immediately get something that is comparable to that. Topher: You need to put in those hundreds of hours of development to make a theme. Rob: As of today, yes. That may change soon though. Topher: Watch this space.  Rob: That’s all I’ll say.  Topher: Okay. So now we know who it’s for. I’m assuming there’s a website for it. What is it? Rob: Yeah. If you go to WPrig.io, we have a homepage that shows you all the features that are there in WP Rig. And then there’s a whole documentation area that helps people get up and running with WP Rig because there is a small learning curve there that’s pretty palatable for anybody who’s familiar with modern development workflows. So that is a thing.  So the type of person that this is designed for anybody that wants to make a theme for anything. Let’s say you’re a big agency and you pull in a big client and that client wants something extremely custom and they come to you with Figma designs. Sure, you could go out there and find some premium theme and try to like child theme and overhaul that if you want. But in many situations, I would say in most situations, if you’re working from a Figma design that’s not based off of another theme already that’s just kind of somebody else’s brainchild, then you’re probably going to want to start from scratch.  And so the idea here is that this is something to replace an approach, like underscores an approach. Actually, WP Pig was based off of underscores. The whole concept of it, as Morton explained it to me, was that he wanted to build an underscores that was more modern and full-featured from a development standpoint.  Topher: Does it have any opinions about Gutenberg? Rob: It does now, but it did not when I took it over because Gutenberg did not exist yet when I took over WP Rig.  Topher: Okay. What are its opinions? Rob: Yeah, sure. The opinion right out of the gate is that you can use Gutenberg as an editor and it has support like CSS rules in it for the standard blocks. So you should be able to use regular Gutenberg blocks in your theme and they should look just fine. There’s no resets in there. It doesn’t start from scratch. There’s not a bunch of styling you have to do for the blocks necessarily.  Now, if you go to the full site editing or block-based mentality here, there are some things you need to do in WP Rig to convert the out-of-the-box WP Rig into another paradigm essentially. Right when you pull WP Rig, the assumption is you’re building what most people would refer to as a hybrid theme. The theme supports API or whatever, and the assumption is that you’re not going to be using the site editor. You’re just going to kind of do traditional WordPress, but you might be using Gutenberg for your content. So you’re just using Gutenberg kind of to author your pages and your posts and stuff like that, but not necessarily the whole site.  WP Rig has the ability to kind of transform itself into other paradigms. So the first paradigm we built out was the universal theme approach. And the idea there is that you get a combination of the full site editing capabilities. But then you also have the traditional menu manager and the settings customizer framework or whatever is still there, right? These are things that don’t exist in a standard block-based theme. So I guess an easy example would be like the 2025 WordPress theme that comes right out of the box. It comes installed in WordPress. That is a true block-based theme, not a universal theme.  So it doesn’t have those features because the assumption there is that it doesn’t need those features. You can kind of transform WP Rig into a universal theme that’s kind of a hybrid between a block-based and a classic theme. And then it can also transform into a strictly block-based theme as well. So following the same architecture as like the WordPress 2025 theme or Ollie or something like that is also a true block-based theme as well.  So you can easily convert or transform the starting point of WP Rig into either of those paradigms if that’s the type of theme you’re setting out to build. Topher: Okay. That sounds super flexible. How much work is it to do that?  Rob: It’s like one command line. Previously we had some tutorials on the website that showed you step-by-step, like what you needed to change about the theme to do that. You would have to add some files, delete some files, edit some code, add some theme supports into the base support class and some other stuff. I have recently, as of like a year and a half ago or a year ago, created a command line or a command that you can type into the command line that basically does that entire conversion process for you in like the blink of an eye. It takes probably a second to a second and a half to perform those changes to the code and then you’re good to go.  It is best to do that conversion before you start building out your whole theme. It’s not impossible to do it after. But you’re more likely to run into problems or conflicts if you’ve already set out building your whole theme under one paradigm, and then you decide how the project you want to switch over to block-based or whatever. You’re likely to run into the need to refactor a bunch of stuff in that situation. So it is ideal to make that choice extremely early on in the process of developing your theme. But either way it’ll still work. That’s just one of the many tools that exist in WP Rig to transform it or convert it in several ways. That’s just one example. There are other examples of ways that Rig kind of converts itself to other paradigms as well. Topher: Yeah. All right. In my development life, I’ve had two parts to it. And one is the weekend hobbyist, or I download cadence and I whip something up in 20 minutes because I just want

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #180

  Episode 180 – A Chat With June Liu

  Oct 22, 202534 minS2

  Introducing June Liu June Liu is the Creative Strategist at backpocket ACE, where she helps projects run smoothly and accessibly. She’s also the co-editor of WP Wonder Women and co-founder of Speed Network Online. Show Notes Backpocket Ace LinkedIn WP Accessibility Day Bio Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher, and my guest today is June, and I’m going to make you say your last name. June Liu: Okay. Hi everybody. I’m June Liu. Yep, Liu. It’s the easier way to pronounce it. You don’t want to do the Mandarin way. Topher: I do. What is it? June: “Leo”. Topher: Liu. Okay. Fair enough. June: Yeah. Good enough? It’s not an easy sound to make. I enjoy hearing it as Liu over the Mandarin way, so don’t worry about it. Topher: All right. June: So, it’s good to be here. Topher: Yeah, thank you for coming.  June: Sure. Topher: I had never heard of you before recently when you and Michelle did the speed, not dating, networking thing. And I thought, “Hey, somebody new. We should get to know her.” So I literally know essentially nothing about you. So who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? Etc. June: Okay. My name is June Liu. Let’s start there. I’m outside of Washington D.C. in a little tiny place called Vienna, Virginia, if you’re familiar with it. It’s a small township outside of a very big metropolis area. But it still has a small-town feel, so I’m happy with this area.  The reason probably why you never heard of me because I’ve only really returned to work in the last three years. So that’s…  Topher: Okay.  June: Yeah. I met Michelle working through WordPress Accessibility Day. Last year, I was selected as one of the organizers. And that’s where Michelle and I met. I had the bandwidth to do more for WPAD last year. So I just kind of put my hand up anywhere they said, “We could use somebody.” And I was like, “I got time. I’ll do it. I’ll try it. I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll try it.” Topher: Stand back. June: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Last year too I was also working with Bet Hannon on the sponsorship process of the WPAD event and helping her just getting all that information together for sponsors and contacting sponsors and just kind of working through that process. And it allowed me also, because I knew who the sponsors were, it helped me be a liaison into the marketing team. So that’s how I started working with Michelle there. She was the lead for marketing team last year.  This year, Michelle and I co-lead the marketing team, and I still am on the sponsorship team working with Bet. So that’s kind of my happy place recently.  But as for what I do, I am a marketing consultant. It won’t be too far of a stretch here to imagine that my focus is on accessibility in marketing. What that all means is putting together a marketing campaign. When you put it all together, you want to make sure that you have the accessibility features in mind.  Much like how you do a website and you make sure that you have alt tags in your pictures, you have the right heading, structures, etc. For marketing campaigns, we want to make sure that the message that you’re sending is inclusive, first of all, and then if you have any subsequent links that goes with it, that it is understandable what you’re trying to promote and it’s just not a blank link that says, “click here.” So that’s kind of where my world merge between where my happy place is and what I’m trying to build.  My agency is called Backpocket ACE. It’s a nickname given to me by a former supervisor. So I thought it was a pretty cool little name for a company, and the domain name was ready. So it was mine. How can I resist that?  Topher: Nice.  June: That’s a little bit about me. Topher: Okay. So what I’m hearing is you do marketing stuff. How does that relate to WordPress? Did you just happen to choose WordPress as an area? June: Well, I kind of stumbled upon WordPress about, oh, I guess it was like 15 years ago now. I was working for an association management company. And it was a former client there that said, “Hey, we need to figure out how to get your system to work with our system.” And I was like, “Well, what’s your system?” And they said, ‘WordPress.” That was probably around 2014 or so. Oh, yeah, that’s 10 years or so. Back then, I was like, “Oh, what is that?”  So that was my first introduction into WordPress. And then a few years after that, I didn’t really get a chance to work with WordPress too much more. After that, I left the company and I became a caregiver for my mom. So that was the reason for my long hiatus. But when I came back, I was kind of like, “Well, I don’t want to go back into a corporation. I want to try to do something on my own.” And so I was like, “Well, what little organization, what little group is out there?”  And in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “WordPress. WordPress.” That was kind of the unfinished business and unfinished research that I didn’t get to finish. So I was like, “Well, let’s look into this.” So I found that’s how I kind of… when I said I stumbled onto WordPress, yes.  So I landed on WordPress.com first, like a lot of people, and then realized, no, that’s not what I want. And then I found my way through a couple of friends who introduced me to different networking groups. And then I was like, “Okay, I’m on the right path of creating my own website and, you know, finding WordPress network groups that allowed me to learn more about WordPress, learn about other people and what they do in WordPress and how. And still I’m trying to figure out how I fit into the WordPress world, essentially.  Knowing Michelle has given me a leg up this year. I’m just going to praise her right now for a moment. But she really has given me a platform to find myself and to find my voice. In addition to Speed Network Online, she and I also work on WPWonderWoman, the newsletter. So I get to find out a lot about women in WordPress. And I’m happy to hear that there are so many women that is in the periphery and in the core of WordPress.  I’m very happy to hear that since when I started learning how to code and stuff, I was really just the only woman in a company of pretty much all men. And for me to learn how to do what I did eons ago, it was at W3 Schools. That’s how I learned HTML and CSS. But it was nice to see that there’s so many women involved in WordPress. It’s just nice to kind of, you know, you turn around and you find another woman there. So yeah, so that. Back to Michelle, though, she’s kind of pushed me a little bit and say, “Okay, come on, get out of your comfort zone. You know, you can do this.” And being able to be code lead with her in WPAD, the Accessibility Day event, she gives me latitude to try different things, but she’s right there to support when I need it, and being that sounding board.  So it’s finding my skill set again and being more confident with my own skill set and having opportunities to meet people like you, and then eventually into a podcast. Hey, look at that. Topher: Yeah. June: That’s how I found WordPress. Topher: That’s really, really cool.  June: Yeah, thanks.  Topher: Have you been to a WordCamp yet? June: In 2023, I went to the first… That was my first WordCamp. That’s the one in Washington, D.C. It was kind of like nearby.  Topher: Yeah, WordCamp US.  June: It was nearby. So I was kind of like, “Yeah, I think I’m supposed to go.” I think my stars aligned and I’m supposed to go. So that’s what I did.  I met a lot of people, but it was a star align that I should go. And I’m glad I went. But on the flip side of that is I met too many people that I didn’t know how to follow up yet. Topher: Oh, yeah.  June: When I came back from WordCamp, I was kind of like paralyzed. I wasn’t sure how to advance. Then from there, it was a lot of baby steps, you know, and a lot of trial and error and trying to formulate my voice and then eventually still reaching out with people that I met there and say, “Oh, yeah, I remember meeting you there. I’m not sure if you remember me, but this is what I do now.”  I should back up when I went to that WordCamp, I probably had just come back with the idea of the business, and it had been like three months. So, yeah, so I really jumped in and said, “I had no idea what I’m doing.” But, hey, you know, in that WordCamp, I met lots of people that I’m still in touch with now, and I’m pretty happy with that. And I even got my Michelle and me selfie. Topher: Oh, nice. Excellent. Are you going to Portland in a couple of weeks, days? June: No. No. Unfortunately, no. It’s a little cost-prohibitive. The event itself isn’t that high of a cost for the entry fee. It’s the flight. It’s the hotels. It’s the transportation. Topher: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.  June: And then, of course, my own, shall we say selfish desire to stay in Portland another week. And I have family out there on the West Coast, so I’m like, “Well, I can’t go to the West Coast and not see them, you know?” Topher: Not say hi. Yeah.  June: So that would have extended all my time. And then I’m like, Mm. Hmm. I do plan to do it again one day. It also is, you know, once I have a bit more budget to spend on networking possibilities and events. But it’s in my mind to do so. Topher: The big WordCamps can be very overwhelming. They get easier as you go to more because you see people that you saw last time. And that’s fun. But I would really recommend you try a small one. WordCamp Montclair isn’t that far from you. I think they’ve already done it this year, but- June: They have.  Topher: There was like 150 people. You can easily meet everyone and have a great conversation, you know? June: Yeah. For this year, Montclair, it was on my to-do list. It’s driving distance for me. So I was thinking about doing it, but it fell on a bad weekend for me so I wasn’t able to. But yes, it’s always on my mind to figure out, well, which events can I go to? And even like Buffalo, when they had color code, I thought about going there. And again, it was another bad weekend, you know, scheduling-wise for me. But I think with more advanced planning and with event being more top priority for me as an agency, I will definitely be going more often. Topher: Nice. That’s pretty cool.  June: So are you going to WordCamp? Topher: I am going. It normally would also be prohibitive for me, but I got a sponsor. So that helped a lot. June: I’ll plug another Michelle project. She and Marcus Burnette did SponsorMeWP. That is a way for people to get sponsorship as they contribute to WordPress Core or make WordPress. So yeah. That’s another plug. Maybe we should call this the Michelle Love Fest. Topher: Yeah. She has her own podcast. We could just go be on that. June: That’s true too. She’s interviewed me for Women in WordPress. And then when we launched Speed Network Online, she also did that for in post status. Happiness- Topher: Gotcha.  June: That was fun. Yeah. Topher: That is cool. Wow. June: So if people who are listening to this is interested in Speed Network Online, our next event is next Thursday, August 21st at 10 a.m. Eastern time. I don’t know when you’re putting this out, but Speed Network Online is going to be monthly. So check us out online. Speednetworknetworkonline.com. You can find our schedule there too. Topher: If people are going to listen in the future, is it the same like third Thursday or something so that people could just go or is it a dated thing? June: It’s not. We’re trying to randomize it because, you know, there’s time zone differences, which we’re trying to give opportunities to people on the APAC side of the world and Europe and even in like the West Coast. You know, sometimes when we do it at 10 a.m., it’s really early for them. And people are probably not the most comfortable to network at 6 a.m. or such. So we try to randomize it.  We’ve done one at… I think it was 2 p.m. And then we’ve done one… Oh, I don’t remember anymore. But this is our third so far. So we’re really hoping that people find value in this and then we can continue. There is a small fee. Topher: I did one and I- June: Yes, I know. Topher: I did one and it was a great value. June: I mean, I understand that if you’re… it does move kind of fast. So if you’re somebody who wants to take it a little slower, it may feel a little overwhelming. But, you know, Michelle is in the main room and everyone else is in breakout rooms during the one-on-one conversations. And if it’s too overwhelming, you can just kind of stay in the main room with Michelle and that way you won’t feel like… you can catch your breath, basically. Topher: Right. Yeah. That’s cool. Something else I was about to say, and I don’t remember what it was. Oh, well, I know. I’m going to put the link to the Speed Networking in the description of the podcast so we’ll be able to find it. June: Thank you. I appreciate that. Topher: Yeah. So we’ve talked about what you do for a living, what you do in WordPress, talked about Michelle. I remember what else I was going to say. I’ve seen posts occasionally, like on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, where somebody says every day or every week, I try to pick one person and say wonderful things about them. I think it’d be interesting to have a podcast where you get several people together and pick a person and just talk about how great that person is for a while. June: Like we’re doing for Michelle right now. Topher: Exactly. And they don’t have to be there. They can come along later and say, “Oh, look, people said nice things about me. That’s great.” June: Well, I think I do think that would be fine. I also think that, you know, some people aren’t as… they don’t promote themselves as much, even though they do a lot of good things, you know? That’s definitely an opportunity to kind of shower some love on somebody who’s quietly doing the behind-the-scenes things. Topher: Sure. Yeah. I know a lot of people who do really amazing things. And within the right circle, they’re very well-known because they do great things. But outside of that, not so much. And it would be interesting to highlight those people. June: Oh, absolutely. Topher: So there you go. There’s two podcast ideas. So I expect to see those from you. June: So you’re teaming up with me to do that, right? Topher: Oh, sure. Well, if I started another podcast, I think my wife would be grumpy. This is only the second episode we’ve done since 2023. June: Oh, really? Topher: Yeah. We just kind of, just kind of put it down for a while and didn’t do it again. And then somebody said to me, “Hey, can I be on your podcast?” And I thought, “Sure, let’s do it right now.” June: Yeah. Topher: Like with you, like I contacted you this morning and said, “Hey, want to do it?” June: Yeah, exactly. You also do HeroPress, right? Topher: I do. I’m delighted to hear you’re familiar with it. June: Yes, I am. I am. Tell me more about Hero Press. Topher: Okay. So Hero Press is a blog, I guess you could say. It’s a collection of essays from people who’ve leveraged WordPress to make their lives better. So I have people from all over the world, all ages, genders, languages, cultures. I work really hard to access diversity in as many intersections as possible. So yeah, like everything I mentioned, age, gender, height, culture, ability, all that stuff, I really reach for that.  You know, it’s people in repressed economies making great money remote working. It’s older people on their fourth career. It’s single moms who don’t have to put their kids in daycare because they can work from home with them.  And each essay is written to their peers. But they get to decide who that is. I mean, everybody has a really diverse peer set. Some people have done exactly what I expect and some people have really surprised me.  June: How so?  Topher: I had a blind person once do an essay and I assumed that they would write to other blind people and it never occurred to them. June: Yeah.  Topher: I work really hard not to suggest too much, not to make assumptions. Sometimes people ask, you know, what should I do? And I say, well, you’re this and you’re that, and you’re here and you speak this language and you know, you’ve moved different countries, you know, whatever. But for the most part, I try to let people think themselves.  And the whole idea is for them to suggest to their peers, I did this, maybe you could too. It’s whoever they identify with, whoever they want to speak to. June: I mean, you’re definitely giving a platform to people to share their voice. Everybody has a voice. Sometimes it needs to be encouraged to let them share and that it’s okay for them to share. Topher: Yes. Yeah. Many people say, “Oh, my story is not interesting. No one wants to hear it. I don’t have a story.” Like, “Hogwash. I’ve been talking to you for three minutes and I’m fascinated already.” June: I don’t know if you follow Humans of New York. Topher: No. June: You don’t know that one?  Topher: No.  June: Humans of New York started as a social media platform. I think it was on Instagram and this person went onto the streets of New York and just interviewed people that this person found interesting. I can’t remember who the creator was. I don’t even remember if they were male, female, or what they identify as. And they had such a following on social media that they created both… I haven’t heard a lot of them recently, so it’s a little fuzzy. Details are a little fuzzy. But I think they had enough for a book definitely and possibly like a DVD. But Humans of New York, it’s all these interesting stories of people. And New York has the feel of interesting people, but the level of how interesting they are is just like, wow. Topher: Yeah, you know- June: That goes to everybody has a voice and everybody has a story that people would love to hear about. Topher: Yeah. When I started HeroPress, I used to research people before asking them to write. Partly I wanted to know, is this an interesting person, and we’ll talk about that in a sec, probably to make sure they weren’t a horrible person, you know?  June: Understood. Topher: But I’ve backed away from that a little bit because what I’m finding is that everyone is interesting. Everyone has an interesting story, even people who think they don’t. Sometimes I’ve noticed that me telling their story back to them helps them realize how interesting it is. Like, wow, I never thought of that. I didn’t think about that. I guess not many people have done this, you know? That’s interesting too. So a lot of the j

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #179

  Episode 179 – A Chat With Amber Hinds

  Oct 14, 202558 minS2

  Introducing Amber Hinds Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a company specializing in WordPress accessibility and maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin. She is the lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, board president/co-lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Day conference, and participates in the WordPress core accessibility team. Through her work at Equalize Digital, Amber is striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet, regardless of ability. Since 2010, she has led teams building websites and web applications for nonprofits, K-12 and higher education institutions, government agencies, and businesses of all sizes, and has become a passionate accessibility advocate. Show Notes WordPress.TV Talks Amber’s LinkedIn Equalize Digital WP Accessibility Day 2025 Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey folks. Welcome to Hallway Chats. My name is Topher. I’m your host. I’m here today with Amber, and I’m going to make her say her last name because I do that with everybody. Amber, who are you? Amber Hinds: I am Amber Hinds. It sounds like the ketchup, but it’s spelled differently. Topher: Yes. Spelled like a deer. Amber: Yes. Or behind. We made the mistake, though, of giving one of our children a middle name of Beatrix, and so her initials would be her first name, B. Hines. Topher: Yes. Amber: If she were to write it with the initial, and I was like, “Maybe she’ll just never include her middle initial in her signature.” Topher: My sister’s first name is Elizabeth, but she goes by Beth, and so her initials then become BAD.  Amber: Oh.  Topher: She likes that. She likes writing BAD for her initials. Amber: That’s fun. Topher: All right, so where do you live? Amber: I live in a town called Georgetown, which is just north of Austin, Texas. Topher: Oh, all right, cool. My in-laws live 50 miles north of you. Amber: Oh, in like Waco? Topher: No, De Leon. It’s a very, very small town. Amber: A town I’ve never heard of. Is it small? Topher: Yeah, it’s very small. You asked me about being on this podcast years ago. Do you remember? Amber: Oh, probably. I think when I first started my current company, Equalize Digital, I was like, “I should try and do some podcast interviews.” And I think I did a whole round of that maybe in like 2020 or 2021. Was that when I messaged you about it? Topher: It was some time before a WordCamp in Alabama, Birmingham? Amber: Oh, WordCamp Birmingham, yeah, that might have… that was more recently because it was more post-COVID, I think, right? That was one of the first WordCamps that came back. Topher: Yeah, at Birmingham, it had been long enough that I apologized that I never got back to you. Amber: Well, I didn’t remember that, and I’m not mad, so we’re all good. Topher: Good, good, good. All right, what do you do? Amber: I am the CEO of Equalize Digital, as I mentioned, which is a company that focuses on accessibility on the internet. We have a heavy focus on WordPress because that’s where we all started. It’s our love. We have a plugin called Accessibility Checker for WordPress websites, but we do a lot of accessibility consulting and auditing outside of WordPress land as well. Topher: All right, cool. For those unfamiliar, what does accessibility mean? Amber: Accessibility is all about making sure that websites work for people of all abilities. This means it could be anything from someone who is blind or deaf or someone who has mobility issues, people who have dyslexia, certain fonts can make it difficult for them to read on websites. So it’s really about making sure that everyone can access your content and buy things from you if your website is about selling things, even if they are not typically able, or maybe they’re not using a computer with a typical device. They might be using a screen reader or an alternative keyboard. They might not be able to use a mouse. Topher: All right, that’s cool. You mentioned consulting and plugins. First question, do you fix websites that have accessibility issues? And two, do you just build websites and they happen to be accessible? Like if somebody came to you and said, “I need a website,” will you make one? Do you do that? Amber: So the first question, do we fix websites? Yes, if they are built with WordPress. We have come up with what has worked really well for our customers is recurring remediation plans, which you can find information about this on our website. But basically, instead of trying… Topher: Oh, wait, where’s your website? Amber: Oh, our website is equalizedigital.com. Topher: All right, keep going. Amber: And what we do with that is not just copy their whole website to a staging site, work on it for however many weeks or months, and then launch it with all the fixes. What we try and do is break up accessibility fixes into small bite-sized things that can be released quickly so that remediation goes out over time, and then it allows people to spread out costs. So we do do that. We do not these days anymore build new websites with small exceptions. So we…  Topher: I have a million dollars. Will you build me a website? Amber: Probably. I mean, it depends on what it is, right? Topher: Yeah, yeah. Amber: But our background came from being a WordPress agency, and we built a lot of enterprise websites. When we were last building websites regularly, to give you a picture, our starting price was $50,000. Topher: Okay. Amber: And we built a lot of… Interestingly, we got into a niche of building WordPress-powered web applications or portals. There’s actually a talk you can find on wordcamp.tv about one web application we built. The talk is called Uber for Nurses, which is the best way I could think of describing this. But a lot of times… I didn’t know this until we started working with this company. But a lot of hospitals don’t have enough on-staff nurses to do every procedure, like putting an IV in. Topher: Interesting. Amber: And so they will use freelancers, and freelance nurses might go around between different hospitals in a city, just getting an order, like, hey, this patient in this room needs an IV or needs this thing, and they’ll drive there, and they’ll do it, and they’ll get paid to do that one thing, and then they’ll go to a different hospital, or they’ll go to a nursing home, or whatever that is. It’s weird. It’s kind of like Uber for Nurses.  It slightly scares you about going to a hospital. I kind of want to ask every nurse now, “Are you actually on staff here, or are you a freelancer? What’s going on with the situation?” But there is a talk from WordCamp US. My partner Steve and I talked about that application, which has a lot of great screenshots if you want to see more of what I’m talking about when I say we built a lot of WordPress-powered apps. But we do do some websites occasionally, either for existing clients that want a refresh, or we have partners sometimes that will come to us and say, “Hey, we really want to partner on an RFP,” and if it makes sense, then we will do that.  A lot of times we aren’t doing the dev, though. We’re more the accessibility team and consultant on those projects. Topher: Right. All right. That’s cool. You mentioned a partner. How big is your company? Amber: So I have two business partners, one of whom is my husband. And then we have another partner. So Chris is my husband, Steve is our CTO. And he started as our developer, and then we realized that we just worked super well together, and it made sense, and so he came on as a partner. Then we have a full-time developer, an accessibility specialist, a content specialist, a designer. And then we have a handful of contractors that we work with, particularly different people with different disabilities that do testing for us. We actually do user testing sessions where they get on and we record, we walk them through scenarios, and then we provide feedback to customers. Topher: How does that work? Do you have a studio where people come in? Or like I’m assuming somebody with mobility disability doesn’t want to come to your place. They want to do it at home in their living room or whatever. How does that work? Amber: So before COVID, we did run user testing sessions in person at our office in Georgetown, which meant we were typically only working with people who were somewhat local, either to Georgetown or we partnered with Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. And they would sometimes drive students up to our office.  The wonderful thing about COVID was it forced us to figure out how to be able to run these over Zoom. So we now do user testing sessions over Zoom, which is nice because that means that our clients can attend them as well, instead of just getting the recordings. We used to take a camera on a boom mic and put it up over their head looking down at their computer before we were doing this on Zoom, right?  Topher: Right.  Amber: And sometimes we’d have two cameras, like one over their shoulder, one straight down so you could see what they were doing with their hands on their keyboard, and they would just get the recording. But now they can come on Zoom, which they don’t always choose to, but a lot of them like to because then they have the opportunity to also ask questions of the user. Topher: Right. When I was imagining this, I was imagining having multiple cameras. So you can watch their hands. You can watch what’s on the screen, what they see. How do you mimic that with the Zoom? Or do you not need it? Amber: I don’t feel like we need it anymore, being able to see what their hands are doing. If someone has an advanced Mac, it is possible to have a keyboard view camera, interestingly. But a lot of our user testers are actually on Windows machines, and they don’t have it. I think the biggest thing is adapting the questions that I have to ask them. And sometimes I’ll pause and I’ll literally say, “What key are you pressing?” And I’ll just ask them to make sure that I have clarification on what they’re doing, if I’m not sure. Topher: Yeah. I just realized that you could have your phone join as a second Zoom person. Amber: You could. It would be a lot more difficult, particularly if our user is a blind user because we would have to walk them through positioning their camera, which isn’t impossible. It’s not impossible, but it definitely would require a lot more work for, I think, probably little benefit. Topher: Yeah. Amber: Okay. Topher: That’s really interesting. I know less about accessibility than I would like, but I feel like my history on the web has helped a lot with just general understanding. When I learned HTML, there was no CSS, there were no images. And so we wrote very plain HTML. And I’ve heard a lot of people say that plain HTML is very accessible. It’s when you start getting crazy with JavaScript and whatnot that it becomes less. I feel like I’m generally aware of it and I make accessibility sites. I know about colors, you know, I know about- Amber: Color contrast. Topher: Yeah. Tab order stuff like that. Because when I started tabbing is how you moved from link to link on every browser.  So please tell me something that you are surprised that more people don’t know. Like what do I don’t know? I mean, you can’t really know, but when you look at somebody who’s an experienced web developer, they probably don’t know X and they should. Amber: One of the most common mistakes that I see in WordPress themes created by professional developers who sell the themes are that they don’t use headings in the proper order. They still, a lot of times pick a heading or we’ll make something a heading because they wanted to have a certain size or color or font, not paying any attention to the fact that those numbers behind the scenes are actually used to convey meaning to a screen reader user in particular about the page and how the content is nested and you know, what is on the page. So that is one thing that always shocks me when I look at WordPress themes is that is done wrong so much. I think another really obvious thing that a lot of people forget on the content side is providing link text that makes sense on its own without having to read any surrounding content. So we still see all the time people who just link the word “here”. Like they write a sentence, “To contact us, go here, and then click here,” instead of just writing, “contact us here and linking the whole phrase.” Learn more, download. Download what? All of these things can really make it difficult for a screen reader user to know what’s on the page, where to find the information that they need to find, how to go where they need to go, how to add the right product to the cart. Like if it only says add to cart on a page with like 10 different products, but it doesn’t include the product title. So those are things that are super basic that can make a huge difference, but are overlooked a lot. The other thing that I would say at this point that I think frustrates me to a degree is when we encounter things like empty links or empty buttons, things that can be very, very easily detected with an automated testing tool, like our accessibility checker plugin. Because what that shows me is that those developers aren’t even using the bare basics. Like I understand if you’ve never turned on a screen reader, thinking, I’m going to go screen reader test my WordPress plugin, is really daunting. But at the same time, there are so many amazing automated tools, our plugin or browser extensions that you could just in seconds get some of these major critical blockers for people identified and then you could fix them. And so for me, I think that is probably one of the more frustrating things when it’s like you clearly didn’t even try. Topher: Yeah. Something I struggle with as a website builder is that the people managing the content do terrible things. Like my theme is all set. All the buttons are right, all the links are right, all my theme images have alt text, all that stuff. But like you said, they’ll write a sentence and link the word here.  I had a senior content manager one time tell me to not link to the phrase, but rather just the word here because she didn’t like the way a longer link looked. And that really bothered me, but she was the boss.  Amber: Unfortunately.  Topher: When I started HTML, all headers looked the same. Their entire purpose was to indicate structure. It was a text browser, so you can’t make them bigger. You can’t make them bolder. Amber: Yeah, it was before CSS. Topher: Yeah. And so they all looked the same. Crazy. So I’ve already asked you now what you think people are doing wrong. Anything you want to get off your chest, anything you want to say to the world, hey, stop doing that or start doing this. Or did we already cover that? Amber: No, I think we mostly covered it. I would say the biggest thing about accessibility is you have to just start testing. It’s not an overnight thing. You know, like I mentioned, we have these plans where we try and make small fixes over time. But the reality is that is a good accessibility practice.  In many ways, it’s like SEO. A lot of your listeners probably understand that you don’t just like SEO to optimize something and then say, I’m done now. You’re doing it the whole time over a period of time. You’re constantly using different tools to check it and going back and revising, if needed, old content or adding new content, those sorts of things. Accessibility is very similar. You want to be regularly running tools that will alert you. And if an accessibility problem has occurred on the website, you want to regularly be doing some manual checking as well on your own. You want to start making little fixes prioritized by how critical a problem might be. And then just like putting into your regular practice of doing that, whether you are a website owner doing this on your website, or whether you are a WordPress plugin or theme developer doing this in your own products.  And I will say like particularly I’ve put a lot of effort in the last couple of years of trying to promote WordPress plugin owners putting more effort into accessibility. Because when you think about the impact of that, it’s not just like fixing one website. Fixing one website is amazing, and it makes that one website really great. But a plugin that’s used on 10,000, 100,000, a million websites, they fix a problem like an empty button or, you know, whatever. And now think about the great impact that has to all of those sites that are using their plugin. So I really think if we want to see meaningful difference and change happen on the web as a whole, because if we think about WordPress powering 40-some percent of the internet, it has to begin with the plugins. Topher: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I had another question for you. Now I’ve forgotten it because I was listening so intently to what you said. Oh yes. Okay. So, not being in the accessibility world, I don’t pay a lot of attention to products and processes and all that stuff. But I saw a tremendous uproar in social media, not too long ago about a plugin called accessiBe. And it was all about how terrible it is. I didn’t even pay enough attention to know what it was they were doing to know why it was bad. What kind of plugin is that? Or is it a plugin? Is it a service? What are they doing? Why is it bad? Amber: So accessiBe is a company that is grouped in what is generically called accessibility overlays. Other examples of this are AudioEye, UserWay, Factually, which is a French-based one. And basically many of them have WordPress plugins, but they are SaaS services that allow you to install their plugin or just put a line of JavaScript in the header of your website.  And then it does two things. One is it puts a toolbar on the front of the website, which you may have seen that when you click it, it expands and it allows people to change, you know, stop all animations or increase the font size or change the contrast to a high contrast mode or switch it to dark mode or many other things.  And then the second thing that they do is they use that JavaScript to attempt to modify or fix the website as the page loads. So it would look for all of the link, like all of the images that don’t have alt text and it would use AI to attempt to write alt text for all of the images. Which can have particularly bad results on like an e-commerce store. It won’t always pick the right information that somebody would need to know to know if they’re going to buy this particular article of clothing or whatever.  And they are also known for… actually, they will try and detect if someone is using a screen reader or if somebody is using a keyboard navigation, like hitting the tab key to move through the website or their arrow keys instead of a mouse. And then they’ll make further modifications. There is a website called the Overlay Fact Sheet, I think it’s just overlayfactsheet.com, which has a ton more information about these products and why they are bad. And it has comments and feedback from actual people with disabilities about their experiences with that, many of whom have spoken out and said that th

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #178

  Episode 178 – A Chat With Joni Halabi

  Oct 8, 202527 minS2

  Introducing Joni Halabi Joni Halabi works at Georgetown University where is the web web content manager for the office of the president. She also volunteers on the WordPress Accessibility Day project, managing the translation of transcripts into a variety of languages. Show Notes Joni’s LinkedIn WP Accessibility Day 2025 WP Accessibility Day Translation Page Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. This is your host Topher, and this week I am with a new friend that I don’t know at all. Can you tell me your name? Joni Halabi: Hi, my name is Joni Halabi. Topher: Excellent. And where are you from? Joni: So, originally, I am from New Jersey, but these days I live just outside the Washington DC area.  Topher: And what do you do for a living? Joni: I’m actually just coming on the other side of a little bit of a career shift, but for the last few years I was working as a web developer. Most recently with Georgetown University’s web services department, but in the past, I’ve worked with agencies and software companies working on the front and what I lovingly call a middle-end development. So, basically, anything that’s right up before backend development, it used to be me. About a year ago, I did a bit of a career switch and I am still working for Georgetown University, but I’m working more on the content side of things. So I am now the senior web manager for the office of the president at Georgetown.  Topher: Oh wow. Joni: I manage our website, I manage a few other websites as well, writing content, redesigning some of our sites to be a little bit prettier, more accessible, nicer looking and so on. So that is my day job. Topher: That’s cool. How many people manage the content for the president of the university? Just you? Joni: One. Just me. I’ve actually originated the role. They did not have a web manager prior to me joining the team. I’m embedded in the communications team and it’s wonderful. It’s a very different way of working than working with a development team. Writing human words instead of code. It’s very different, but I love it. Topher: That’s great. I’m assuming you saw a need and pitched it. What need did you see and how did you pitch that? Joni: Actually, they started the process. I had already been thinking about leaving the development world for a little while and I just decided after 20 years I was getting close to done writing code. So I started looking around.  I did a little bit of a very informal job hunt and I started looking at our internal job boards and I saw that the president’s office had this opening for a web manager and it just looked really interesting. It looked right up my alley because I didn’t want to leave the web. I really just wanted to leave computer code. And it was wonderful.  They were looking for somebody to manage their websites because the team that I’m on, they are very heavily focused on writing and supporting the president in that way, in that communicative way. But not a lot of them had really deep web experience and they were looking for someone with that kind of experience. So I applied and it’s been wonderful so far. I started a little bit over a year ago. Topher: I assume you’re working with WordPress.  Joni: Yes.  Topher: So in your role, how valuable are WordPress specific skills? Like could any good writer walk into this or are you particularly valuable because of your WordPress skills? Joni: I’d like to think that I’m valuable because of my web skills because it’s a lot of… We have a very custom implementation of WordPress at Georgetown, which is great. In my previous role in the web services team, I wrote a lot of custom blocks for WordPress. So we have a very, very customized version of the post editor, which is where you write everything. I bring that to my role, but also this role needs a really good combination of writing for the web skills, but also designing skills. My goal is to present the content that we have for our website in a way that people will engage with it meaningfully and will actually read the words. Ironically, that means having fewer words because it was a long time ago, nobody reads. What I really want to do is be able to tell the story that I’m trying to tell with as much visual media as possible. So when I can find videos, when I can find good photos, I’m trying to lean very heavily on the visuals because I know that is really the engaging part. If somebody is visiting our website and they’re not engaged and they don’t really see themselves or at least a piece of themselves in the story, they’re probably not going to read it. Topher: Right. Yeah. Joni: Yeah. Topher: I’m reminded of the old saying, when you want to make a sculpture, you just take a block of marble and cut away everything that isn’t your thing. Joni: Right. Topher: And you take a wall of words and get rid of all the ones that aren’t your message. Joni: Exactly. Yeah. Topher: That’s cool. One of the reasons we’re talking today is because Accessibility Day is coming up and I would love to hear about how you’re involved. Joni: I am the translation team lead for WordPress Accessibility Day, which is a 24-hour fully online and free conference that focuses on that intersection of digital accessibility and WordPress. I don’t remember how I heard about the conference originally, but a couple of years ago, I applied to and was chosen to speak at the conference. So I gave a talk a couple of years ago about creating accessible SVGs and using those in a WordPress plugin to create accessible graphs. So it was a very tech-heavy talk. Topher: Wow, that’s cool. Is that available anywhere online? I’d like to watch that. Joni: It is actually. All of our conference videos are available online. We record everything and we make all of our videos available after the conference is over. They’re all available online. They’re on YouTube. They’re linked from our website. Yeah, it’s a really great conference.  After I spoke at that conference that one year, like a few years ago, I had gotten, I think an email or I saw a Slack message somewhere where the team was asking if anybody was interested in volunteering or being a team lead. And I said, “Sure, let me join this meeting that you’re having that introduces people to volunteering with the conference.” At that meeting I had mentioned that in many, many jobs ago, I had worked as a translation manager for a software company. So I was managing the translations of our software and of our websites into 13 different languages. And they said, “Well, that’s cool because we want to translate the captions from all of our videos into different languages. And I said, “Well, that sounds right up my alley.” So I was accepted into that universe and became the translation team lead. I’ve been the team lead for a couple of years now. And we have been translating mostly into Spanish and French, but we translate into also Italian and Hindi and Hebrew, German, Dutch, Portuguese, quite a few languages. It’s been great.  I initiate the process by generating an AI translated version of our captions, our captions all start in English, and then I hand that AI generated caption file to a human translator and they clean it up with the goal of using the AI to maybe make my human translator’s lives a bit easier. It’s been working well so far. We have, I want to say, like 70 or 80 translations online already. Topher: Yeah, that’s great. Do you translate or do you manage translators? Joni: I manage the translators. I have a very difficult time learning other languages, which as a programmer, computer languages are much easier for me than human languages. In the past, I’ve studied German, I studied Spanish, but my brain never really made the flip to being fluent enough to do something like translation or even get anywhere close to it.  I’m fascinated by the way languages work, like the way that they intermingle with each other. Depending on the languages, you can kind of see the connections between different sets of languages, like the Germanic languages. You can see those links, the Romance languages, you can see those links. And it’s really cool. So that’s how I nerd out in this realm. Topher: That’s cool. I have done a little bit of translation stuff with like pot files and profiles and stuff, and I’ve worked with YouTube SRT files. How do you take a translation and make it into an SRT file? It wants timestamps and all that kind of stuff for all the lines. Joni: It does. We use WebVTT files. I start out with the VTT file for English and that has all of the timestamps in it. I actually turn that there… I found a tool online that will turn that VTT file as a text file — it’s essentially all text — into HTML and I’m using Chrome’s translate to translate just the words from that file into whatever language I’m aiming for.  So let’s say Spanish. Chrome’s translate function will translate that file into Spanish. I copy that into a new VTT file and it still has all of the original timestamps. Topher: Okay. Joni: And then I hand it off to the translator and then they give it back to me. I specifically give my translators instructions to not mess with the timestamps. Topher: Do not touch. Joni: Don’t touch them. If we find out later that we need to change them, we can do that on our side, on the conference’s side, but I don’t want the translators to worry about that because sometimes it does get a little weird. German, for example, can expand by up to 40% from the English. Japanese can actually contract about like 20-ish percent from the English.  We haven’t really run into too many issues so far, not on wood. But yeah, I give the translators the VTT files and so far they have done wonderfully with them. Like they haven’t minded that format. Topher: Okay. That’s pretty cool. It’s not a terribly difficult format. I mean, I’ve edited them. That is super cool. Can you tell me why accessibility is important to you? Why are you here? Why do you care? Joni: That’s a great question. I care because I want everybody to be able to experience the web and experience the content on the internet. It really started at Georgetown. We were having issues with accessibility on our own sites. One of my primary jobs, like at the very, very beginning of when I started at Georgetown was to help with accessibility remediation. And I really got to see firsthand how much of a difference there is between an inaccessible site and an accessible site. And we did. At the end of our project, we did make our websites and our templates accessible. Our goal was WCAG 2.0 at the time, AA compliance. And it just makes such a difference. I mean, I’m fortunate enough to be able to use the web in a mostly typical manner. I wear glasses, but I’ve noticed like, as I get older, my eyesight is failing me, so I’ve noticed I have to bump up the fonts. And being able to bump up the font size on a webpage kt’s so helpful for me to be able to just read the content. I have a seven-year-old, but seven years ago when I had an infant, I was trying to work one handed because I had a baby and I only had one hand to work with and I had stuff to do. I mean, that’s not a typical use case for accessibility, but that is a temporary situation because my child grew. It’s a temporary situation where I really wasn’t able to make full use of my mouse because I’m right-handed, my kids in my right hand, tabbing away with my left hand.  But I mean, it makes you realize like it is so important to make websites and apps accessible to the point where everybody can use them. Because I mean, why not? Why not do it? There really isn’t a logical reason to make something inaccessible. Kind of like there’s this cartoon, it’s like a one panel comic of a bunch of kids waiting outside a building. I think it’s a school and there’s a bunch of stairs and there’s a wheelchair ramp and you can see there’s a guy in front of the building shoveling the stairs to let the kids be able to get into the building. And there’s this one kid who’s in a wheelchair and he said, “Excuse me, can you please do the wheelchair ramp first?” And the man shoveling said, “Well, let me do the stairs and then I’ll do the wheelchair ramp.” The wheelchair user points out if you shovel the wheelchair ramp, “We can all get in.” Topher: Yes. Yep. That’s good stuff. Joni: I mean, it’s so analogous to accessibility online. If you make it accessible for the people who really, really need those accessible features, you’re making it an even better experience for everybody else too. Topher: That’s a really, really great analogy. I like that a lot. So, you did a great job telling us what accessibility is. I should have asked, but I didn’t. When is it… Is it only online? Is it someplace you can go visit? Joni: Our live conference is coming up next week as of this recording. It is October 15th and 16th. I think I said this before. It is a 24-hour… Maybe I didn’t say this before. I don’t remember. I’ve been talking about this conference to a lot of people today. But it is a 24-hour online and free conference. Topher: Okay. Joni: You can sign up. Like I said, it’s completely free. We have talks going one an hour for 24 hours straight. And fully realizing that people cannot be awake for 24 hours straight, we record all of our conference talks and they will be available shortly after the conference for anyone who misses one of the talks that happens to be at 3 a.m. their local time. You can always go back and watch or rewatch any of our talks. Topher: Sure. What is the website address? And what is the official title? Again, just saying Accessibility Day, but what is that? Joni: The official title is WordPress Accessibility Day. This year’s conference site is 2025.wpaccessibility.day. Topher: All right, cool. I’m going to pull that up right now and look at it and I’m going to spell accessibility, right? Joni: You know what? I have the same issue sometimes. Like my fingers work faster than my brain does and I type things wrong sometimes. Topher: Yeah. And I can’t remember if there’s an A or an I in the middle. It did not load for me. Oh, I just get a black page. Joni: Oh, here, let me put it in the chat for you. WP.accessibility.day. Topher: Dot day. Joni: Dot day. Yes.  Topher: If you go to dot com, it doesn’t work. Joni: Don’t go to.com. That’s not us. Topher: Oh, okay. I’ll make sure this gets in the show notes and stuff. Joni: Great. Thank you. Topher: That’s a good design. I like it. Joni: I cannot take credit for it, but yeah. Topher: I’ve heard a lot of people say that you sacrifice design and features if you have to do accessibility stuff. And this was a great example of that not being the case because it’s gorgeous. Oh, and you can even do the light mode and dark mode. Joni: Yeah.  Topher: Excellent. I’m looking at the site here. Where can I find videos? Joni: Videos. So if you go to our main website… We obviously don’t have the videos up for this year’s conference because this year’s conference hasn’t happened yet. But if you go to our main site, which is just simply WPAccessibility.day- Topher: Yeah, help translate.  Joni: Help Translate is right up there. It’s great. If you go right at the very top, if you go to Iur Events, that will take you to a page that highlights this year’s events, but also includes links to our past conferences from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2020. And each of those archive sites, in the schedule, you can click into the schedule, find a conference or sorry, find a talk that you would like to learn more about, and it will take you to a details page and the video is embedded on that page. Topher: Yes. I am there now. Accessibility is a civil right. Digital accessibility, legal landscape for the WordPress community. Joni: That’s a good one. Yeah. They’re all good ones. Topher: I see that… oh, she’s talking to me. I see the YouTube logo, but this is not the YouTube player. What player is this? Joni: I have no idea. Topher: I wonder if it’s Able, that would be really cool.  Joni: I think this is- Topher: It is Able player. Joni: I was going to say, I should know this. Topher: Are you familiar with Able player? Joni: Only watching the videos on our site, to be honest. Topher: Oh, okay. My friend, Joe Dolson, is now in charge of it. Somebody else built it and handed it off to him recently, but it’s specifically an accessibility focused media player. Joni: Yeah. I’ve heard a bit about it. Joe is on our team leads team. So he is very, very involved in WP Accessibility Day too. So I do know Joe. Topher: That’s cool. Joni: Oh, I was just going to say, going back to translation, so any of our talks that are translated, if you go to the embedded player on the website, in the bottom right-hand corner, if that particular video has been translated into another language other than English, there is a dropdown that will list all of the languages that the captions for that video has been translated.  Topher: Oh, yes, I see it. I found them first by just clicking the CC, the captions icon, and it also lists them. Joni: Oh, yes. Topher: That is really cool. I don’t know any languages other than English and not even that very well, but I love linguistics. I love seeing how languages fit together and translations and things like that. And so this has always been fascinating to me. So I’m envious of your task. Joni: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it is a lot of fun. Topher: Yeah. Joni: And it’s great working with the different translators who have volunteered to help us too. They are an amazing bunch.  Topher: How many do you have? Hundreds and hundreds? Tens? Joni: I would love hundreds and hundreds. I would love to expand the team. I think I have about maybe 20 active translators right now. Some come in and they only have time to do one or maybe two translations and that’s wonderful. I have others coming in and they’re up to like 8 or 10 translations. So it just depends on who has what amount of time when. But we’re always looking for translation help. So if any listeners are fluent in other languages and they feel like helping us out, that would be wonderful. I would love to have you. Topher: That would be cool. Joni: So yeah, you can go to our website, again, WPaccessibility.day and click on the translate link and read all about our translation team and you can sign up to help us out. Topher: All right. I think it’d be cool… I’m making up a task for you as a developer. Are you familiar with the translation stuff for just WordPress in general, like Polyglots team and all of that? Joni: I’ve heard about the Polyglots team. Yes. Topher: I would love to see a video translation tool that is similar, like where you just upload an English… what was it? WebTT? Joni: VTT. Web VTT. Topher: Yeah, upload a VTT file and somebody just can go to a webpage, type stuff in and move on. Because one of the things I’ve always admired about the Polyglots team is how simple it is for a translator to do that. They don’t need to know

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Hallway Chats. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.