[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, what to expect from WP Accessibility Day 2024.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Isla Waite, Bet Hannon and Ryan Bracey.

Isla Waite, originally from the UK has lived in Sacramento, California for 17 years. With a background in graphic design and over a decade in website project management, she recently started her own accessible web design business. Three years ago, Isla joined the WordPress accessibility meetup led by Amber Hinds, which also led to her involvement with the WordPress Accessibility Day. She is now a team lead, managing the tech and vendor teams to promote web accessibility.

Bet Hannon has worked with businesses and nonprofits for over 16 years, helping them build WordPress websites, integrate other communication channels, and learn how to use digital marketing tools more effectively. She is the founder and CEO of AccessiCart, a services agency that focuses on accessibility and e-commerce, along with other high user interaction websites. Bet lives in Bend, Oregon and is a co-organizer of the WordPress meetup there.

Ryan Bracey is the director of web development and user experience at Second Melody, a mid-sized branding agency located in New Jersey, which builds custom WordPress websites for clients of all sizes and industries. In this role, Ryan has taken a holistic approach to accessibility within the agency by promoting collaboration between clients and departments alike, to ensure all phases of a project are completed with intention.

During the podcast, we discussed the significance of WordPress Accessibility Day, which is a 24 hour virtual conference running on the ninth to the 10th of October, 2024.

It’s free to attend, and we’ll offer a wealth of resources around the topic of WordPress accessibility. The event will include live captions, ASL interpreters, and professionally created event transcriptions.

It’s being driven by a team of passionate volunteers, and is geared towards making the digital space accessible for all.

We’ll cover the logistical details, including how to register, and the optional donations and sponsorships that can enrich your participation. Our guests share their personal motivations and experiences that fuel their dedication to the accessibility cause.

We also get into the global reach of the event with translation efforts and volunteer opportunities that make WordPress accessibility day 2024 for a truly inclusive initiative.

Isla, Bet and Ryan talk about the challenges and triumphs of advancing web accessibility. The importance of both conformance and compliance, and practical steps you can learn about during the event to make your website more accessible.

Whether you’re a developer, a designer or a content creator, this episode is packed with insights and inspiration to help you contribute to a more accessible web using WordPress.

If you’re interested in making the web a more accessible and inclusive place, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Isla Waite, Bet Hannon and Ryan Bracey.

I am joined on the podcast by Isla Waite, Bet Hannon and Ryan Bracey. Welcome to you all.

[00:04:51] Bet Hannon: Great to be here.

[00:04:52] Ryan Bracey: Thank you, yeah.

[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: Very, very nice to have you. I can’t actually remember if we’ve had three guests on the podcast before.

A quick hat tip before we begin to Michelle Frechette, who has been instrumental in lining up this podcast episode and wrangling today’s three guests.

In no particular order, I’m just going to go in the list that I’ve got them written down on my screen. Would you mind just doing a very quick one minute introduction, quick bio about who you are? Something relevant to what we’re going to be talking about today, which is the WordPress Accessibility Day 2024. So let’s start with Isla. Could we just have your little bio please?

[00:05:24] Isla Waite: Okay, my name is Isla Waite, I hail from the UK, but I live in Sacramento, California for the last 17 years. I have been in website project management for, gosh, more than a decade. Graphic design was my original life, and before that I was in Britain doing things.

I recently started my own business in accessible websites. I stumbled upon WordPress Accessibility Meetup, run by Amber Hinds, about three years ago. And through that discovered WordPress Accessibility Day and said, yes, I’ll get involved in that. And now I am one of the team leads, I’m the tech and vendors team lead.

[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: Very, very nice. Thank you so much for that. Okay, next one on the list is Bet. Bet, would you do the same? Just introduce yourself.

[00:06:05] Bet Hannon: Absolutely. So I’m Bet Hannon, I’m the CEO of AccessiCart. We are an accessibility services agency that focuses on e-commerce and other high user interaction sites. And this is my third go around with WordPress Accessibility Day. I serve on the board of directors, I’m the treasurer, and I am the team lead for finance and sponsors. So I primarily do money things for WordPress Accessibility Day.

[00:06:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you so much. And finally, last but by no means least, Ryan.

[00:06:36] Ryan Bracey: Thanks. So yeah, Ryan Bracey, I’m the director of Web Development at Second Melody. We’re a branding studio located here in New Jersey, where I’m also located. Yeah, much like Isla, I stumbled across Accessibility Day through Amber Hind’s Accessibility Meetup. Joined as a volunteer three years ago, been an organiser for the past two years, and this year I am helping out as the team lead for speakers. So, dealing with everything related to talking to speakers, reviewing speakers, making the schedule, with the help from a lot of other people.

[00:07:06] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. I obsess about WordPress, and so it’s not news to me that the WordPress Accessibility Day is a thing, but it occurs to me that maybe a bunch of people listening to this podcast will not have heard of this event before. So, whoever wants to take the question, could you just briefly outline what it is, what the intent is, and maybe, given that it’s coming up very soon, let’s get the date and the URL out there as well, so that people can pause this podcast, go and have a look, and then come back and press play again. So whoever wants to take that, just give us the lowdown, the introduction to when it is, and what it’s all about.

[00:07:39] Ryan Bracey: Yeah. So WordPress Accessibility Day will be held this year, October 9th through 10th. We are a 24 hour conference, that’s why it spans the 9th through the 10th. So there are 24 hour long sessions. You can tune in starting on the 9th, watch all the way throughout the day, the night, into the next day. We are an international conference, a hundred percent virtual, so this is why we’re able to do a 24 hour day.

So no matter where you are in the world, you can find a session that you’re interested in, that works for your schedule, participate how you want to participate. And our main focus here is just WordPress accessibility. So looking at educating and informing people on accessibility within the space, how they can help out, how they can get involved, and hopefully educating some people on things they didn’t know.

[00:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you so much. I don’t know about the schedule too much. We can come to that in a moment. I don’t really want to particularly cherry pick out individual speakers, although you may wish to later.

But given the fact that it’s running around the clock, so this 24 hour cycle, has that given you an opportunity to highlight different parts of the world, and raise the profile of different communities?

So, you know, we’ve got three flagship events which span the globe, Asia, Europe, and America. But, you know, there’s communities in Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan, South America, all of these things. Has that been an endeavor? Is that part of the whole 24 hour nature, to raise the profile of different community members throughout the world?

[00:09:04] Isla Waite: Absolutely, yeah. This year in particular, we have grown our marketing department of this nonprofit Accessibility Day, and thank you to Michelle. We are sending out social media, and blogs, and podcasts in all different areas of the world. She’s connected with all kinds of people to make sure stuff is pushed out at appropriate times for different time zones.

We’ve had good responses to those things. So we now have team members coming in from different regions in Australia and Hungary. Speakers from all different places, all around the world. I think this year, as it should be, is better than the last, and next year will be better than this year, and that will keep happening.

[00:09:42] Nathan Wrigley: Bet I think it was, that mentioned that she was a director. And when I hear that word, it immediately summons up some sort of structure in the background, you know, a hierarchy of people and what have you.

A lot of the events that I’ve seen online, I get the impression that it’s a bunch of friends that get together sometimes, and organise an event around a particular theme. But given that there’s directors and things like that, I’m presuming that there’s more going on in the background, a little bit more of a professional nature to it. Perhaps like a, well, we call it in the UK a charity, I think it’s called a nonprofit in North America. But is there some sort of structure in the background like that?

[00:10:16] Bet Hannon: Yes. Intentionally done in 2021, as we were going into 2022, was really thinking about, and one of the things that we, as a community, felt was really important was making sure that our speakers were compensated. All over the world, often people with disabilities are not compensated, and we expect them to do the educational work, but we expect that we want our speakers to be compensated.

So there’s a small stipend that they get, and that was not allowed by the WordPress Foundation. So we explored other options, and we incorporated ourselves as a 501 C3. So we are a nonprofit organisation within the United States. And we exist under the fiscal umbrella, or the kind of oversight, fiscal oversight, of a larger nonprofit called Knowbility, that does a lot of work around education and accessibility awareness.

That gives us the, we have the nonprofit piece, and so we just have three board members, so it’s not huge. And then we have the organising team for the event that has grown quite dramatically. You know, Isla talked about things kind of improving year to year, but this is by far the most organisers and volunteers that we’ve had, in terms of getting things put forward.

And we’ve been able to do some amazing new things. You know, Isla mentioned the marketing efforts that have really stepped up this year. But we’ve also had some folks step forward, not so much related to the day of the event, but to start doing some translation so that we’re able to, you know, all the talks happen in English, but we are wanting to be sure that we’re finding some ways to translate those into Spanish, and French, and other languages that folks are interested in having them appear in, so we can spread the word.

[00:11:56] Isla Waite: Shout out to Joni for all the work she’s done for that.

[00:11:59] Bet Hannon: New translation lead, so that’s been amazing.

[00:12:01] Nathan Wrigley: So a lot of the events that are online in the WordPress space, a lot of them are free to attend, certainly. Some of them are, you know, there’s a gatekeeping aspect to it, it might be financial, it might be the surrender of an email address or something like that. Is there any barrier to participating in this event during the day, or can literally anybody rock up and consume the content that you are creating?

[00:12:23] Isla Waite: I was just commenting that, wouldn’t that be terrible if we put a barrier in the way of people accessing WordPress Accessibility Day?

[00:12:30] Bet Hannon: We’ve worked really hard to make sure that there are no financial barriers for attending this. And so you can come to WordPress Accessibility Day. The only thing you need to do is surrender your email because you need an account to log into the Zoom, to attend the events. You can opt in or out of our mailing list though. So it’s free to attend.

We offer you the option to give a $10 donation. If you want an event t-shirt, you can make a $50 donation. If you want to micro sponsor your company for $150, you can do that. But we have some amazing sponsors that have come in to help us put on the event.

It’s more than just needing a streaming service to be able to do the event, because we’re offering live captions, because we’re talking about technical matters, sometimes that’s an issue, right? We have to have folks that are really skilled at doing those sorts of live captions. We’re offering live ASL interpreters during the event. And then, really quickly after the event, within the next few weeks, there’ll be professional transcriptions done.

As you probably know, when you are doing a transcription of an audio, not a lot of them that are technical get everything right, the AI versions of those. And so having folks that are skilled to do that is a piece of that.

So those things together, having the streaming service, and all those other things to get it all out, our amazing sponsors are helping us to do that in a way that makes it free for people to attend.

[00:13:52] Nathan Wrigley: So if I was to show up and I surrender my email address, it’s going to be taking place through Zoom, and you’ve given some nice options there for some things that you can do to help the cause, if you’d like to buy a T-shirt or what have you.

But if I turn up and I wish to read the captions, I think you mentioned there that you’re going to be having live captions. That implies, although I could be wrong, that you’ve got a human, a person actually transcribing them in real time.

And I think you’re right, the option to do that with technology falls over so quickly with technical terms. And no doubt, a WordPress event, there’s going to be hundreds of words bandied around, which wouldn’t be accurately transcribed, so that’s really nice. So you’ll be able to read those, and I’m guessing that that will be in English.

[00:14:33] Bet Hannon: Yes. Initially, all the presentations and all the captions will be in English.

[00:14:36] Nathan Wrigley: And is that the case for all of the presentations as well? I was to, yeah. So everything throughout the 24 hours is in the English language, and the captions will be in the English language as well, okay.

[00:14:46] Bet Hannon: Right. And our hope is that, you know, our volunteer translators are going to be getting to work fairly quickly, and starting to put those out as they can, right? Again, the translation pieces are all done by volunteers.

[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So, as soon as the session has ended, you’ve got, in your team of volunteers, there’s a bunch of people who are going to be transcribing those into, well, I’ll just name some languages and you can tell me, things like Spanish, and Italian, and what have you, and Japanese and things like that.

[00:15:11] Bet Hannon: The big focus is Spanish, and then after that French, just in terms of the number of places that those languages are spoken. But we do have volunteers that pop up, for example, you know, there’s some languages in the different regions of India that people have an interest in making sure that the talks are available to their communities, and so folks can step up. And so if you have folks that, you know, I was in an interview earlier today, and someone expressed an interest in translating for Arabic because they want their community to be able to access this information. So if you have a community that you want to volunteer to help translate for, reach out.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: Bet, where would we reach out to?

[00:15:48] Bet Hannon: So the wpaccessibility.day is the website, and we’ll get you the link for that. And then there’s a volunteer section, and people can volunteer.

[00:15:56] Isla Waite: I think it very much depends on where we can get volunteers from. We have ideal languages that we know are very popular in our part of the world, but we want as many languages as possible. So there’s really no restriction on who might volunteer and from where. And if you can speak another language, then we want you.

[00:16:13] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just going to ask a question one at a time. And, again, we’ll just go in the order of the people that we did before, so I’ll start with Isla. It’s a personal question so you can answer this in any way that you like.

Why have you gone in the direction of accessibility? Given all the interesting things that you can do online, why has accessibility become such a crucial part of your life, such that you are being involved, and giving up probably quite a lot of your time to organise an event like this? So it’ll be the same question, but we’ll begin with Isla.

[00:16:38] Isla Waite: For me, I don’t think it’s any one thing. I think a number of things sort collided at the same time for me in my professional career and private life. Like I said, I’ve been a project manager for more than a decade, with a background in graphic design. Before that I was in the military.

I am a very mission-focused person, and I was finding after a decade that, as much as I love my clients, I have some wonderful clients, I felt like, I need something to dig my heels into, and my fingers, and my brain, that has a bigger impact. And I think a lot of people find that at some point in their career. I just needed to see that I was somehow making a difference. Just little me, you know, little part of it, little butterfly wing situation.

So that was part of it. And then, like I said, I stumbled across the Accessibility Day, Accessibility meetup. I was just intrigued. At that point I was really just learning what accessibility was. I stumbled upon the quote by Tim Berners-Lee, you know, the internet, access for everyone regardless of disability, which is now in my signature block.

And then my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, which is one of those hidden diseases for a long time. But early on, I watched him struggle on the internet. So he’s, at the time, in his sixties. I was watching over his shoulder, just sort of trying to do something really simple. I was like, huh, this could happen to anybody, it’s not just Alzheimer’s. I’m very interested in the cognitive side of things, as much as the seen disabilities.

Anyway, that all sort of happened at the same time, and I decided, this is a path for me I think. And then just recently, I got involved with IAAP, the International Association of Accessible Professionals, and I just passed my CPAC. So yeah, for me it’s about getting on a path for the rest of my working life, and maybe beyond, where I feel like I’m doing something that my heart is driving.

[00:18:18] Nathan Wrigley: What a lovely answer. That’s great, thank you. Same question to Bet.

[00:18:23] Bet Hannon: Yeah, so I had been around flagship WordCamps and hearing about accessibility a little bit. But in 2016 we had a, one of our clients mentioned they needed help making their site accessible. And so that was when we really, about eight years ago, we really dug into learning about accessibility.

And when our team did that, we realised all of us on the team had people that we knew that were impacted. And we saw the difference it makes in people’s lives, to be able to be independent, and have sense of human dignity in being able to do stuff on the web.

And so much so that we shifted the focus of the agency. So it is what we do, but it’s, my take on it is, I hope we work ourselves out of work. I mean, if we could get to the point where nobody needs help learning how to do accessibility, because it’s just something we all do and know how to do. And so that’s a piece of what drives me to work.

With Accessibility Day, is really just sort of extending that education and finding ways to help people learn and grow, and know how to do accessibility better. Because I think when we know better, we can do better. But to think about building in empathy for different ways of accessing the web. It’s just a huge part of what I want to be about, so this organisation gives me a chance to do that.

[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, another great answer. No pressure at all, Ryan.

[00:19:43] Ryan Bracey: I know, I can’t believe I have to follow those two.

[00:19:46] Nathan Wrigley: Two really powerful messages, so over to you.

[00:19:49] Ryan Bracey: Similar to Bet’s timeline, right around 2016 for me. I’ve been a developer for, gosh, probably over a decade as well. But around that time period, 2016, we had a lot of clients coming to us mentioning accessibility. And up to that point in my career, it hadn’t really been something I knew much about, or given a lot of focus to.

Started really focusing on it because it was a client ask, obviously something I needed to do for work. And as I went down that path of researching, what is this? What do I need to do to be compliant? I stumbled across Amber Hind’s accessibility meetups, started attending those, found this really warm and welcoming community.

And just the whole push behind it, or the movement behind it even of, when you do this work it’s, I mean, yes, at the end of the day, we’re just creating websites, but it’s something so small that, why should we ever create a website that not everyone on earth can access? Meaning, yes, it doesn’t seem like a huge impact overall, in the big scheme of the world, but everyone has the right to be able to do anything anyone else can do. So why not just something as simple as browse the web.

And then as you really dive more into it, you realise a lot of the things you do to help cater to the accessibility crowd, you’re also catering to everybody in the world. So when you make something easy for one person, you make it a lot easier for everybody. So there’s added benefit across the board. It makes your work a lot better, it makes your work more accessible, everyone can participate.

I was also lucky around that time to find WordPress Accessibility Day. So I volunteered as a moderator, I believe I was three years ago. At the same time in my professional life, at my company, we went through massive growth. We had some restructuring, I was promoted to director of the website department. So as part of that role, I was tasked with also becoming more active in the community. So already had spoken at Amber’s Meetup, I was already a little bit of a part of Accessibility Day, so I took a larger role as an organiser. Lucky enough to work at a company that gives me the ability to do those things, and encourages me to do those things.

I think to echo what both Isla and Bet have said, it just really kind of gives meaning to your day, to know that what you’re doing is making someone’s life a little bit easier.

[00:22:08] Nathan Wrigley: That was also a fabulous answer. I think, in the last sentence, you encapsulated it in the one word, meaning. I think maybe that sort of sums it up. It gives some significance to work, which could otherwise be fairly technical and a bit dry. You know, if you’re just building websites all day, every day, I think it would be easy to, I don’t know, maybe you are fascinated by that for its own sake, but it would be easy to lose sight of that.

And everything that you’ve, the three of you have just mentioned, points to a kind of more moral dimension to the work of building a website. I get this intuition, having spoken to many people in the community that you are in, that it seems to be replete with genuinely nice people, which is just lovely. I mean, the WordPress community itself is fairly nice, but then there’s a subset of that community, the WordPress community, the accessibility in WordPress community, which seems to have its own high level of loveliness, for want of a better word.

[00:23:07] Bet Hannon: Well, Ryan kind of touched on that, you know, like finding this warm community. And I think that’s, you know, a lot of us work from home, and serving on this planning, organising team, for me, and I think for others too, is a way that we really connect every week. You know, we’re meeting most of the year, every two weeks. We’re now in the kind of pitched lead up to the event, so we’re meeting every week, and we get a chance to know one another. A lot of us have never met face to face yet, but we’re just a part of each other’s lives in a way that is genuinely warm and supporting, and that’s awesome too.

[00:23:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really nice. If somebody was to be listening to this and decides, you know what, I’m going to show up for the Accessibility Day 2024. Are there parts of the event which enable socialising, for want of a better word, or is it all about the presentations, or do you have, I don’t know, breakout rooms, or some way in which people can facilitate what you’ve just mentioned? You know, this kinda moral aspect, this nice camaraderie that you’ve all got.

[00:24:02] Bet Hannon: If you only log into the Zoom, then you’re just consuming the presentations. But there is a Slack channel that you can get access to, and there will be a lot of chatting going on there. And that’s where you’ll get notified if you win any of the sponsors prizes, and the drawings and those kinds of things. So the Slack channel is the place where you could start to make some connections.

[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: So there are opportunities for that. So, dear listener, if you are going to attend then, you never know, you might come out of it with a bunch of new friends as well, which is really nice.

I’m just looking at the website itself, you have the most fabulous URL, by the way. It’s wpaccessibility.day. I mean, it couldn’t be better, that’s just great. Well done for bagging that one. That website itself, I’m presuming had to go onto the microscope quite a lot. Given the nature of the event, it would be somewhat remiss if the website had glaring accessibility errors in it.

I don’t know if any of you three have been involved directly with the website, but I’d be interested in hearing some of the challenges. I think we all know that the idea of a hundred percent accessibility is something a bit off there into the distance, and it may never be achievable in anybody’s timeframe. But, what are some of the things that you’ve really gone out of your way to make as accessible as possible over there?

[00:25:14] Bet Hannon: I want to like give a shout out to Ryan because he designed that website for us.

[00:25:19] Ryan Bracey: Thank you Bet.

[00:25:20] Bet Hannon: It’s awesome. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Ryan?

[00:25:23] Ryan Bracey: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, I do work for a branding agency, and as part of my involvement last year with Accessibility Day, we donated our agency resources to the group. There was interest to go through a rebrand, get a new logo, get a new entire branding.

So my wonderful branding designers that I work with, and I’ll give him a shout out, Jay Zawislak, he is our creative director, took this on. He designed the logo, chose the color palette, chose the fonts. And when he went through that exercise, he worked pretty closely with myself, just because I’m a little more versed in accessibility.

But we were really looking at, from step one of coming up with the brand, are these fonts accessible? And accessibility, as you mentioned, there is no a hundred percent, it is a spectrum. What works for one person might not work for another person, and vice versa. But you can look at small things like, if I do a lowercase l, a capital i, the number one, are those glyphs all different? Is the spacing between letters enough that it’s easy to read? Are the characters distinct enough that they’re easy to read?

So even looking at fonts in that way, when we were picking colors, we were comparing all the colors against each other to make sure contrast worked. So wherever text is laid over a color, those have been checked.

We also then took an opportunity to kind of showcase what can be done in an accessible website design. So when I designed it, I worked closely with our other board member, Joe Dolson, who actually started Accessibility Day, and now leads our website team as well, developed the website. And we decided to try to showcase things that can be done to make a site beautiful and accessible, because there is a little bit of a misconception within the design community that accessible design means ugly design, which is not true.

So we even, you’ll notice at the top of the site if you are on it, there is a toggle to go into kind of a dark mode. We really wanted to showcase that this can be done in an accessible way. It honors users’ browser preferences. If you prefer dark, it’s in dark by default. If you prefer light, it’s in light by default. We made sure when you switch it over everything is accessible in that mode as well. So that was done very intentionally too, because dark mode was kind of a big trend last year. So when we did the site, we wanted to show that can be done accessibly as well.

We used a lot of pastel colors. Again, those are often seen as inaccessible. So showing that actually you can have a very colorful site, you can have a soft colorful site in a very accessible way. So a lot of thought went into it. And it was, like I said, kind of used as a showcase piece to say, actually, you can be accessible and beautiful at the same time. You just have to put a little bit more thought into it, but you can have a good product at the end of the day.

[00:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s really nice. I should say, I probably misspoke a little bit, given when this podcast is going to air, the URL that maybe would be more relevant is 2024. So the URL is the numerals 2024.wpaccessibility.day. That will actually get you to the current version of the site. It looks broadly similar, doesn’t it? You know, the design aesthetics, and what have you. But it’s absolutely marvelous. And so thank you for all of the hard work you’ve put in there.

Just out of interest, Ryan, because you’ve been in the weeds with that, how much extra work, if you like, and I know this is a sort slightly contentious question, but if you had built this website, I don’t know, with some kind of page builder technology built inside a WordPress, and you’d had no thought to accessibility at all, against the version that we’re looking at now, how much more time do you actually have to spend on it? Was it a significant overhead, or is it just now muscle memory for you that you can just do it all at the same speed as you would with any website?

[00:29:05] Ryan Bracey: I find there’s actually not a lot of extra work that goes into making something accessible, like I kind of alluded to, it’s just having that thought in your head beforehand. So to kind of draw a design analogy, if you know you’re working with a brand that has a red and black color palette, you know you have to design in red and black. It’s no harder, or easier, or more work, or less work than designing a blue and green website, it’s just a different approach. You have to think about it a little differently.

So accessibility works in the same way, you just go into it knowing, I have to make sure that my fonts are big enough, I have to make sure I’m not pairing fonts, colors, and background colors that no one can see. I have to make sure, if I’m introducing functionality, I’m introducing something that’s well known, it’s being introduced in the right way, I am doing it in a way that’s easy for everyone to use.

[00:29:57] Bet Hannon: It’s really just kind of an additional, thinking about user experience.

[00:30:01] Ryan Bracey: Right. I was going to say, at the risk of sounding controversial, it kind of just is, if you’re good at user experience, you’re good at accessibility.

[00:30:09] Isla Waite: And it gives you boundaries. I know so that many designers flail without some kind of boundaries. And yes, the brand gives you some boundaries but, you know, I was talking to another designer recently, and it’s designed with purpose. That’s how I look at accessibility. Yes, you have a brand, but now you’re designing with a purpose. And going after it like that, everyone just totally is on the same page immediately. As long as the team has an accessible culture, it’s not any different to designing the old way.

[00:30:35] Ryan Bracey: Yeah, it’s essentially just laying out a larger set of design requirements at the beginning of a project.

[00:30:40] Nathan Wrigley: We’re at an interesting time with accessibility because I feel, I’ve said this a few times on this podcast, that if we rewound the clock a decade, then accessibility wasn’t really, it didn’t really have a spotlight on it particularly. But now it really does, almost that it’s the thing of our time. You know, in the year 2024, it really does feel like one of the most talked about subjects.

I think there’s a couple of reasons for that, and the one is the moral dimension that you mentioned, all three of you alluded to that. And actually it felt like that was the dimension for the three of you, you know, the moral aspect to it. And probably behind that a little bit, the community that is behind that moral dimension.

But increasingly, I think there’s going to be a legal dimension as well, where the carrot, if you like, the moral thing, you know, dangle the carrot and hopefully people will come along. That will work for some people, you three being prime examples. But the stick, the legal aspect I think is coming fairly soon. I know that in the European Union, we’re going to have legislation coming around next year, which will make this all the more important.

So attending events like this feels like, really, if you’re not skilled on this, this is the perfect moment to get involved, because at some point somebody might be knocking on the door with some paperwork that you don’t necessarily want to read. That’s not a particularly great reason to do it, but it is a fairly compelling reason. And I don’t know if anybody’s got anything to say about that, about the legal aspect, and the ambulance chasing lawyers and all of that coming up.

[00:32:10] Bet Hannon: The reality is, for a lot of medium and small businesses, they tend to put off a lot of compliance things until they have to. That’s just sort of the way that they are, because of the revenue is just not there to do it often, so that happens. But people do come on board, and try to work at what they are required to do.

And you’re right, we already have that in the US with the serial plaintiff lawsuits. We’re gearing up for the enforcement of the European Accessibility Act. But even in the UK and other places, there are other laws already there that are starting to be more enforced.

And so, yeah, legal compliance is a thing. That is the main topic of our keynote speaker at the event this year in fact. Lainey Feingold is a US attorney who has been instrumental in accessibility law throughout the United States. She got involved with some of the early lawsuits around bank customers who were suing their banks over non-accessible ATMs, primarily blind consumers suing them. And out of that developed a kind of, structured negotiation, bringing together the people who build the ATMs, and the people who are blind who need to use them, and the users.

And so it kind of builds on that user experience that we were talking about before, bringing folks together rather than being antagonistic. I mean, I think people do want to do the right thing. So I don’t know how much of those stories she’ll tell us in her keynote, but she was very, you know, if you’re in the US and you have an ATM with braille on it, Laney was a part of that. She’s going to be talking about the legal landscape for the WordPress community, and I’m really excited about that.

[00:33:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a nice segue Bet actually because, again, the URL 2024.wpaccessibility.day, and then if you add forward slash schedule, to the end of that, you’re going to be able to see what’s going on. And as you said, right at the top of the list is Lainey’s keynote address.

But then underneath that we have all of the different bits and pieces that are rolling out over the following 24 hours, and they’re all clearly labeled, the times that you can see them live, and what have you.

I’m going to put you all on the spot and ask for you to pick one, or maybe two, that you are particularly excited about. Now, caveat emptor, I am not suggesting, even for a moment, that if you pick two, that means the others are in any way, shape, or form, less worthwhile, let’s put it that way. We understand how this works. We can’t mention all of them because we just don’t have the time. But if you find that to be a fair thing to do, I’ll start with, well, let’s go with Isla. Couple that you are particularly excited about, or one, whichever you like.

[00:34:48] Isla Waite: Well, I’m going from my brain, and I’ve only really studied the schedule twice. Once when I was, this is how the process goes, I was eliminating all indication of who these speeches, presentations come from, so that the speaker’s team could go through that, and it was anonymised so there’s no favoritism or anything, so yeah, that’s how it’s done.

So that was my first exposure to, all of the applications of the speakers, which were somewhere in the region of 80 to 100. So the team did an amazing job of getting through all of that, and coming up with the 24, 25 presentations.

I’ve since looked at it once because we’ve been pretty busy. So from the top of my head, I know there is one that focuses on a culture among developers, and that stuff is obviously very, very interesting to me because I work, I guide the team or whoever’s involved in a particular project.

And that involves people who work predominantly with me, and people who work with the organization that we’re helping. It becomes a very molded team of people who need to understand how this all works, and how you’re going to keep doing it going forward.

So I’m always interested on other people’s approaches to that. And I believe that speakers from Hungary, so I’m super excited to hear about that perspective from another country.

[00:35:57] Nathan Wrigley: There’s one right in front of me at the moment which is entitled, Creating a Developer Culture of Accessibility and it’s Jessie Frio, Mark Steadman. So maybe that was the one that you were thinking of. So there we go, we’ve managed to find that one. That’s great. Okay, let’s go to Bet. Same question.

[00:36:12] Bet Hannon: I am, not so much the presentations, I am super excited about hearing Lainey’s keynote. I do a lot of work with folks that are trying to wrestle through all those legal compliance things, and that’s just the nature of what I end up doing with a lot of folks. So I just eat that stuff up, and I really eager to hear from her, she’s a great presenter too.

[00:36:31] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. So we’ve had a culture one, we’ve had a compliance one. So, yeah, over to you, Ryan, for the last one or two.

[00:36:37] Ryan Bracey: Oh wow. As the speaker lead organiser, I feel like I love all my children. We do have some really interesting topics this year, maybe I’ll answer it that way.

To go off Lainey’s keynote, we do have a few other talks that kind of focus around the legal landscape this year. This was a big push for us to get speakers in that area because it is becoming more prevalent.

We also have some interesting talks that focus around accessibility from a designer aspect, which I think is an oft overlooked topic. I think a lot of times it just falls to the developer, when it’s really something that starts in the beginning.

We do have some interesting culture ones, that talk about how to structure accessibility within your company.

But there is one talk I am actually pretty excited about. It is called, How to Remediate Accessibility Issues in WordPress by Cam Coulter. And I think that one’s going to be very interesting to our audience because he’s talking specifically about how to address issues that pop up in WordPress, which, as WordPress developers, we know is not often a fully hardcoded, self-built system. You’re working with a lot of page builders, plugins, third party developers, software systems. So he’s talking about how to identify those things, and make changes when maybe you don’t have access to that source code.

[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, well, thank you. That was nice, all three of you giving us a very different answer.

If you go to that page though, although it might sound on the face of it that accessibility is a niche, it turns out that niche is really broad. I’ll just go through a few, I’m just looking at the page now. So the one that you just mentioned, Ryan, How to Remediate Accessibility Issues in WordPress.

Then there’s one about agile accessibility, Building Inclusivity into the Product Roadmap. Practical Accessibility Tips for Content Creators. Accessibility Challenges with Single Page Applications. Why can’t I use my brand color there, and if not there, then where? That’s an interesting one. Is your page builder, accessible? Captchas and other gotchas. CSS tiny tips. Insights from a community driven survey. Developing accessible Gutenberg blocks. That one would capture I think.

I’m about halfway down the page and I’ll stop there. But you’ve immediately got the idea that this not one thing, there really is a whole broad church of things to be consuming and getting involved in.

So I know it’s not the three of you entirely, but I think this event is going to be absolutely fabulous. So just quickly, one more time, 2024.wpaccessibility.day. Just before we knock it on the head, as we say in the UK, just before we finish, is there anything that you want to just mention as a way of rounding it off? Something that I failed to ask, something that you think was important say. Let’s go round the houses. Let’s start with Isla.

[00:39:19] Isla Waite: Yeah, I want to tack on a little bit to Bet’s comments about the legal stuff. It’s been a big thing in California recently, and I’m definitely not going to go into the details of that. But, you know, eventually California will sort itself out and there’ll be some kind of law that makes sense.

But something that came up in the draft of that bill was compliance, and somewhere else, I believe the word conformance was used. I’ve studied those words a lot having just done my CPAC. Compliance being a legal thing, conformance being in the spirit of. And with all this talk of laws, and people definitely being worried and, scared and, you know, Bet’s clients and mine as well, oh my gosh, how do I get compliant?

Yes, that is super important and, yes, it’s probably going to be the law. But for everyone else who’s just trying to get on board and figure this out, start with conformance. Start with doing something in the spirit of accessibility. All you have to do is squint at your colors and figure out, can I see them if my eyesight’s not very good? There’s so many places you can start to conform, and work in the spirit of accessibility. And I hope lots of those people come to WordPress Accessibility Day 2024.

[00:40:25] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you for that final comment, that’s lovely. And, Bet, anything you wanted to add?

[00:40:30] Bet Hannon: Yeah, I think a lot of times, we’ve kind of alluded to it a couple different times, some of the stuff Ryan talked about. A lot times people think accessibility is something very complex, that only specialists can do. And I try to help people understand, you know, start where you’re at, and if you can put alt text on images, and make sure your heading structures are right, and make sure your link texts are there, and work on your color contrast. That’s a lot of accessibility issues, and they don’t necessarily require very much technical knowledge at all, right? Content creators do a lot of that work. And so get started and start learning, but also, the more you educate yourself, the more you can stop creating inaccessible content.

[00:41:11] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. And it feels like this event is perfectly poised for that. Whether you are really deeply into this journey, there’s content here you. But you are the 101 stage, and you just want some tips right at the outset, there’s things here well. Okay, thank you. And, Ryan, rounding us off.

[00:41:25] Ryan Bracey: Yeah. And I just wanted to say, and Nathan, you alluded to this but, as you read our schedule, we do have a little bit for everybody, and we took a really concerted effort to make sure that this wasn’t a fully technical conference. If you’re not a developer, there are going to be talks for you here. If you’ve worked in accessibility for years, there will be talks for you here. If you’ve just heard about accessibility today on this podcast, there are talks for you there.

So as we’ve mentioned, it is free to attend. So if you go to our website, you can register right now. It’s October 9th, block off your calendar. Each session only lasts for 45 minutes. One happens every hour, so you can kind of watch them at your leisure throughout the day. And like I said, we have something for everybody. So no matter what position or role you work in, no matter where you are in your accessibility day journey, you can probably find a talk that is relevant to what you are looking to get out of it.

[00:42:15] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. And playing it forwards a little bit, I would also draw attention to the menu on the URL, which we’ve been mentioning, 2024.wpaccessibility.day. Couple of things, there’s a volunteer menu item, maybe go and check that out if you’re interested in supporting the event going forwards. And also a donate menu item as well if you want to support the endeavors in that way.

That has been a really interesting podcast. If you are new at accessibility, this event is for you. If you’re experienced, this event is for you. And if you would like to possibly make some new friends in a different community, this event is also for you. So it’s got a bit of everything for everybody.

Thank you so much for chatting to me about it today. Thank you, Isla, thank you Bet, and thank you, Ryan. I really appreciate it.

[00:43:03] Bet Hannon: Thanks for having us.

[00:43:04] Ryan Bracey: Yeah, thank you.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how YouTube can promote the WordPress project.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Jamie Marsland, and it says third appearance on the podcast, which is a first.

Jamie has recently embarked on an exciting new journey as the head of the WordPress YouTube channel at Automattic. This role is set to amplify the WordPress story through engaging and informative video content, capitalizing on YouTube’s reach to over 2.7 billion monthly users.

As you’ll hear, Jamie only started his role a few days prior to recording, but he’s already full of plan lists to transform the WordPress YouTube presence. Automattic created this role to ensure a more focused effort on growing the channel, which currently has around 36,000 subscribers, significantly lower than some of the other WordPress YouTube channels.

Jamie envisions targeting distinct groups. Beginners, DIYers, developers and designers, agencies and freelancers, product suppliers, and the community. Each piece of content will aim to add value whilst trying to maintain some fun.

Throughout our conversation, Jamie shares his insights into why this role is necessary, especially in light of commercial rivals like Wix and Squarespace, who possess enormous marketing budgets. He discusses the importance of bringing new users into the WordPress ecosystem, whether they’re complete beginners or migrating from other platforms.

We also explore Jamie’s broader vision for the channel, including making high quality content that genuinely adds value to the viewer, regardless of its production quality. He stresses that every video needs to answer the question of what value it brings to the audience. Fun and engagement are key themes, but quality content is paramount.

We also touch on his plans to bring in other voices, aiming to build a diverse team that reflects WordPress’ global reach.

Jamie also talks about the balance between engaging the YouTube algorithm and producing valuable content. He shares his experiences and strategies for creating content that draws listeners in, emphasizing the importance of creativity in ensuring all target groups find something of interest.

Jamie assures us that his new role won’t mean an end to his own popular YouTube channel, which has been advocating for WordPress for many years. He plans to continue creating content on this channel, whilst focusing on growing the official WordPress channel.

Towards the end, Jamie hints at the changes that might start materializing by October, post WordCamp US. He’s eager to hear from the community, so if you have innovative, fun or valuable content ideas, Jamie wants to know.

If you’re interested in the evolving landscape of WordPress on YouTube, Jamie strategic approach, or how you might contribute to this exciting venture, this episode is for you.

If you want to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Jamie Marsland.

I am joined on the podcast, again by Jamie Marsland. How you doing, Jamie?

[00:04:35] Jamie Marsland: I am really sorry about all these appearances. I’m great, thank you, Nathan.

[00:04:38] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly, the reason that you’re appearing many times is because you have many things to say. But I believe you’re the first person to appear for a third time. And it wasn’t all that long ago that we were talking about your speed builds happening at WordCamp Europe. Well, maybe that is going to come up today. Let’s find out.

[00:04:53] Jamie Marsland: Well, it’s coming to WordCamp US in a few weeks time, so there you go, there’s a plug for that.

[00:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it’s exciting. Well, maybe we can get into that specifically a little bit later, but that’s not the main reason. The main reason is because you’ve taken on a brand new role. And rather than me butcher what that role is and what you’re doing, you just want to give us your brief potted bio?

[00:05:11] Jamie Marsland: I’m now working for Automattic as head of the wordpress.org YouTube channel, which is an incredibly exciting role to fulfill. So I started literally two days ago, and I’m now in day three, it’s Wednesday, isn’t it? Day three of my onboarding, of which I’m going to go onto the wordpress.org forums this afternoon as part of, when you join Automattic you do a support rotation, so I’ve got two weeks support rotation, and then I start in earnest on the YouTube channel.

[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: Is this a brand new role? My intuition says, I think it is because I’ve not heard of it before.

[00:05:41] Jamie Marsland: It is a brand new role. There is a team working diligently on the YouTube channel doing cool stuff, and they’ve grown it actually really well, but there’s no one sort of leading on the channel. Everyone in that team is doing lots of other cool stuff as well. So this is having somebody completely focused 100% on growing the channel.

[00:05:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I’m imagining that more or less everybody knows what YouTube is, and probably has gone down that alley of stepping into YouTube, and then several hours later figuring out that they’ve lost their entire day on YouTube. Why do we need this role then? So you mentioned that there’s a team. Is it just that it was felt that that effort wasn’t sort of guided correctly, that there needs to be more content? Why the role?

[00:06:19] Jamie Marsland: Can I give you some stats on YouTube, because this blows my mind? So as of 2024, YouTube has more than 2.7 billion users every month. That’s 51% of all people who use the internet. One third of everyone in the world uses YouTube monthly, a third of everyone in the world uses YouTube monthly. And over half the people who use the internet on their phones visit YouTube each month.

So YouTube is, I mean it’s just absolutely massive, and WordPress, the official channel, has as we speak, about 36,000 subscribers. And if you compare it to its, let’s say competitors, it’s lower than it needs to be. So that’s why there’s now a unrelenting focus from me on helping WordPress through that channel.

[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: So is there a particular kind gap that you are trying to fill here? Because obviously, you know, YouTube is just full up of content for literally everything. Is it going to be directed mainly at a particular type of YouTube content? Do you have any sort of intuitions as how that’s going to go? You know, is it going to be related to Gutenberg, or Core? Well, I’ll leave it open to you.

[00:07:22] Jamie Marsland: At the moment, and I’m obviously on day three, this is kind of how I view the world in terms of the content groups we’re going to aim content at. What I’m also asking everyone is to let me know what you think, so I’d be interested to know what you think about this, Nathan.

So these are the kind of groups we’re going to target content at. So I’ve got beginners, group one. DIYers, developers. We’ve got designers, agencies and freelancers, product suppliers. So that’s plugins, and themes, and service providers, and then we’ve got the community. So broadly, six groups of target viewers that, at the moment, that’s what I’m thinking the type of content we’re going to produce content for.

But at the top of that, we have the kind of overlying everything is, you know, every piece of content that we want to produce on that channel needs to kind of tell the WordPress story, or help tell the WordPress story, what the story is. That’s all the things that make me love WordPress. So it’s empowering, it’s free, it’s open, it’s radical, it’s fun, it’s being used by loads and loads of people. So everything needs to kind of fit under that story.

And then we’ve got those groups of people that we want to target content at. And then within that we’re going to have a number of different formats. And then flowing from those formats will be the actual content itself. That’s the way I’m viewing the world at the moment. Early days, I’m asking people to give me their feedback.

[00:08:34] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to give you a little bit of feedback on that. So you had six categories there, and they all speak to people already using WordPress. I wonder if part of the role, given all of the talk that we’ve had recently about, you know, commercial rivals in the website building space having giant marketing budgets, is that piece of advertising to the, as yet undecided, website builder. Drawing in people who are just curious about starting a career in web development, or want their own website? And obviously WordPress has that sort of free and open credentialing to it. Trying to draw them in as well and just say, okay, here’s WordPress, you’ve never used it, this is what it could do for you.

[00:09:12] Jamie Marsland: Yeah, and that’s a massive part of my thinking. I would probably group that group of people into beginners or pre beginners. Yeah, that was one of the biggest pieces of feedback. I put out this tweet, and put a post on Facebook and LinkedIn, and got tons of feedback and fantastic ideas from people of the type of content.

That was one of the strong themes coming through is, how do we bring people on board to WordPress from either, they’re looking for the first time, or they’re using something like Wix and they don’t realise where the roadblocks they’re going to hit at some point in the future? So, one hundred percent.

[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: Just a little bit of personal story then. How did this role come your way then? So just curious as to, two sides to that really. How did the negotiations happen and, you know, how did you get into this role existing in the first place, and why the role now? I guess I’m alluding to the whole Wix thing that I mentioned a moment ago. Is it that the time is right to concern ourselves with the commercial rivals out there and the march that they’ve got into the marketplace?

[00:10:05] Jamie Marsland: So I’m going to skip some steps here, just to give you a broad brush stroke. So I did some research about, I guess it was a year and a half ago was it, maybe two years ago, looking at the YouTube channels of wordpress.com, wordpress.org, and also the competitors, so Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, and a few others. Did a blog post, and then I sent the blog post around to some people within Automattic that I’d sort of been chatting to, and saying, I can help with some of this stuff.

Now, I’m skipping a lot of steps here, Nathan. And following from that, I had lots of discussions. And then I did a series of videos with wordpress.com and the team at wordpress.com, and started chatting to some people within Automattic. So I did 24 videos for them. Obviously more conversations around the video strategy for .com and .org. And, again, I’m skipping lots of steps.

Then I met up with Matt Mullenweg in Turin for an hour, and had a fantastic chat around video, and content, and competitors, and then more conversations. And then it kind of crystallised while I was on a mountain, climbing up a mountain, when I say climbing a mountain, I was walking along a mountain in France. You know, started to formulate what the role could be, what the need was, you know, my desire to do it, which was massive. So for me it’s like the perfect, because I’ve been kind of doing this stuff on my own channel for three years. So this was like the perfect opportunity to kind of work on a bigger stage really.

[00:11:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s great. I’m curious as to the nature of the conversation that you had with Matt. Obviously, Matt, the co-founder of WordPress, largely guides the project, if you like. We have a lot of intuitions that come from Matt, which then turn into the reality of the project. Whilst I don’t want you to reveal anything of a confidential nature, I am curious as to hear what thoughts came up in that meeting as to the importance of this job, you know, the kinds of things that he would like to have seen you doing.

[00:11:47] Jamie Marsland: I mean the first thing to say, it was a great conversation because I’d never met Matt before. So, we struck it off really well, which was fantastic, and massively intellectually curious, that was a very interesting conversation. But it was kind of centered around content, and the importance of video content, and what WordPress is doing in terms of video content at the moment, and just the massive opportunity there is for video content in the WordPress, official WordPress space.

Obviously, there’s some amazing content being produced by other creators, but on the official channel, as I say, we’ve got 36,000 subscribers. So there’s a massive opportunity to get more engagement, and sort of spread the WordPress word.

[00:12:22] Nathan Wrigley: The fact that you are doing content on YouTube, does it allow you this role to also do video content elsewhere? So one of the things that comes into mind is the Learn project, so learn.wordpress.org is making lots of educational content, much of it in the form of videos. I wondered if there was any overlap with those teams, or any opportunity to overlap. Because it sounds like a lot of the pieces that you’re going to be making are educational in nature.

[00:12:48] Jamie Marsland: Obviously it’s very early days, and they’ve got a team producing lots of Learn content, which is currently going on the YouTube channel, which is great. There’s an interesting space which says, what is the connection? Because some of the content they’re doing is very, very good if you are going step by step through videos. But I think there’s an interesting discussion that says, how can we start to tailor some of that content? So it’s kind of more suited to specific YouTube audiences.

Because when you go onto YouTube, you’re kind of in a different frame of mind than if you are going onto a learning management system. And I think they’re two quite separate pieces of content, like some of the content I produce on my channel is more edutainment than just educating people around it. It’s got to kind of grab them quite quickly, and you’ll get more engagement and more learning. So there’s some interesting, definitely some interesting overlaps there. Early thinking on that though.

[00:13:34] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that Matt said during his address in WordCamp Europe, where obviously you had your meeting with him, one of the things that I took away from that was that he wants WordPress to feel a bit more fun. I don’t really have my finger on the pulse of what entirely he made of that, but it did strike me that your speed builds was a really, you know, it was a really credible way of doing that. It’s entertainment with learning bolted in, which is really nice. You get the fun of doing it at the same time, and if you’re paying attention, you will actually learn things, which is kind of like the perfect goal.

I did wonder that was how you were hoping to drive it, if it was supposed to be fun. If you’d got any guidelines about that, if you’ve got any thoughts on that. Because I always enjoy watching fun content more than sort of the dry stuff. But nevertheless, sometimes the dry stuff is what you need to do, so whether it’s a bit of everything, or direction is fun, over to you.

[00:14:26] Jamie Marsland: We’ll bring the fun. There will be more fun, but it’s not all going to be fun. But it all needs to be great. I think the key thing is it’s going to have massive value. If it’s going on the channel, it needs to have massive value to whoever’s watching it, and that’s probably somebody within those six groups. So there will definitely be some, I’ve got some ideas, there’ll definitely be some fun stuff, and definitely more live stuff.

We want to try and have a connection with the end users that are using WordPress. So definitely more fun. But there’s some really cool stuff going on on the wordpress.org channel, which, with a little bit of love and attention, we can elevate to the next level quite easily. Like there’s some amazing developer stuff going on with Justin Tadlock and his team, and Nick Diego, and Ryan Welcher. Just gold dust in there.

And there’s some really simple things we can do really quickly to get them more views. So there’s some easy low hanging fruit. So some of that developer stuff is absolutely fantastic, but there is a lot of stuff on there that’s, at the moment there’s this automatic feed, so there’s a lot of stuff that just, it’s like a bucket, just gets dumped on there.

So there’s a conversation to be had around how we tailor that stuff. Do we keep that process going where it’s just automated? So we have lots and lots of videos on there, which don’t necessarily all reflect what we’re trying to reflect in terms of the WordPress story. I’m not sure that’s answered your question, but there’s going to be more fun.

[00:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: Running through that, the message that you gave me at the beginning of that little section was that you want it to be of high quality. The importance is on the high quality. So if it’s fun and high quality, that’s great, if it’s serious and high quality, it’s great. But if it’s fun and low quality, no.

[00:15:50] Jamie Marsland: And I think, when I say high quality, I’m not talking about production value, I’m talking about value to the person watching it. If it’s filmed on a phone in a field and it’s absolute gold dust, then that’s okay. But it has to be, every bit of content has to ask itself the question, what value am I giving to the person watching this? Why are they going to watch this piece of content? And if we can’t answer that, then it shouldn’t be on the channel anyway.

[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting, sort of editorial guidelines, you know, if the BBC, for example, the British Broadcasting Corporation, I imagine they have a quality guideline about how it looks and feels, not just about the quality of the content. But that’s an interesting position that you take there. If the content is good but the production quality is not that great, that gets a pass.

[00:16:26] Jamie Marsland: I think there’s probably a couple of phases of this. The first phase is, it’s got to be all about the content. And then the second phase, then we look at the production. And you can do these together, but the most important thing is the content has got to have, it’s got to have value.

One of the best lessons I ever learned in running a YouTube channel is that there’s only three reasons why somebody will ever click on a YouTube thumbnail, because you are competing against lots of other people on YouTube. And those are curiosity, number one, hope, number two, or fear. Those are the three psychological triggers that make anyone click onto a YouTube video. There’s some broad guidelines we can start to introduce.

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: I think also it’s important for the creator of the video to have a white border around them, and to be pointing at something with their mouth open.

[00:17:08] Jamie Marsland: Actually, no, that’s not true anymore. There’s been some stats that show that mouth open isn’t working anymore.

[00:17:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh gosh.

[00:17:13] Jamie Marsland: I’m serious about that.

[00:17:14] Nathan Wrigley: People go into it at that level. So the content that you’ve created on your own YouTube channel has been you creating content, and you’ve obviously been very successful at that, and I imagine that that is the primary reason that you’ve got into this discussion, got this job. So bravo for that firstly.

But secondly, does this new job point to an era in which you, the head of YouTube, are making all of the content, or are you hoping to bring other voices in? And into that question I’m going to throw the sort of international thing as well, you know, different languages, different parts of the world, different perspectives.

[00:17:47] Jamie Marsland: So, no, definitely won’t just be me producing videos. I mean, my plan is to make myself redundant over the next three or four years, and build a team of younger, diverse people that reflect where WordPress is heading. So that’s part of my plan. And then part of my plan is, and I’ve been reaching out to other content creators in the WordPress space, is to help them to amplify themselves, and get them on the channel as well. Because there’s some people doing some amazing stuff. And also people in the community.

Plus we’ve already got some existing amazing content that’s going on through people like Justin and his team, and the Learn team. So absolutely not, it won’t just be me. I will definitely be on the channel, but hopefully I’ll be a fraction of the overall content going forward. There was another part of your question, which I didn’t answer.

[00:18:25] Nathan Wrigley: Well, there was the international part, so the different languages all around the world. So it’s not just in English basically.

[00:18:30] Jamie Marsland: Yeah, that’s a really interesting one. So one of the challenges you face when you run a YouTube channel is that, if you produce a piece of content that doesn’t get many views, it’s a bit of a channel killer. So what will happen is their algorithm will say, they’ve just produced, you might have one piece of content that gets like 10,000 views, if you produce a piece of content that only gets like 12 views, that will affect the overall channel views.

You need to be aware of that when you’re running and trying to grow YouTube channel. I’m going to go onto the international bit. So that’s one of the things we need to confront pretty quickly. We need to make sure that the content we’re producing is always creating a high number of views, otherwise it affects the overall health of the channel.

So one of the decisions on the international stuff is, does that fit into that? How does that fit into that? Does that affect the channel because our audience is expecting one thing and they get another thing, and it might get lower views? Or do we say, we create multiple channels for multiple languages, or do we create multiple channels for multiple, like there’s thousands of word, well, not thousands, but there’s lots and lots of WordCamps that happen around the world which are currently being presented on the YouTube channel, which might not get massive amount of views, but are very important content. So the question is, do we have a separate channel for those, so it doesn’t affect the main channel in terms of the algorithm and kind of story we’re trying to tell on those? So those are some of the kind of quite difficult decisions we need to make fairly early on.

[00:19:43] Nathan Wrigley: That’s curious because you are having to worry about the algorithm of YouTube, not just the quality of the content, but whether the content is going to receive the click. So some part of your brain has to be engaged with how viral, for want of a better word, maybe that’s not quite right word. But, you know, something like, how viral will this piece of content be?

And I guess that raises concerns about, if we’re always chasing the algorithm, do we then drop the stuff which may not get the clicks or the views, but could be really important? So for example, the last piece you mentioned, I think it was number six, community, that may not get quite the number of views as, oh I don’t know, the latest, greatest new feature that’s come out in WordPress, or your speed builds, or whatever that may be. But it’s still equally important, and that’s going to be a difficult tightrope to tread, isn’t it? It’s sprinkling that stuff in that you have an intuition won’t be quite so popular, but is probably needed.

[00:20:31] Jamie Marsland: But I think there’s creative ways of making that stuff interesting to people that it will get clicks. That’s the challenge of the channel, right? So all those six groups, I’m confident we could create content that is really interesting, that would get a large amount of clicks. But it needs to speak, it needs to focus on the value it’s bringing to the people that are watching it. That’s got to be the a hundred percent focus.

I spend a huge amount of time on my thumbnails and title, and I want to instill that in the content that’s going on the channel. I do that because, and this isn’t just me making this stuff up, this is coming from like, the best YouTubers all do this as well. And if you do that, then it focuses your video on the value you are creating. You are trying to create to the person watching it. And if you can’t get a YouTube thumbnail and title sorted out, it means you haven’t got your story straight in your head, and you’re not sure on the value of this piece of content is going to bring to the people watching it. If you can’t do that, then you shouldn’t make the video. It’s a really useful discipline to go through, and it’s one I want to instill on any piece of content going forward, because it focuses the whole point of the video.

[00:21:28] Nathan Wrigley: But the bottom line is you are open to other voices, it’s not just going to be Jamie making video content. And a question which is related to that, but not entirely the same, the content that I’ve seen of you so far has been heavily related to a core version of WordPress. You know, you download WordPress from .org and you run with that. You’re not chucking a load of other things in, third party plugins, and themes, and what have you.

And I do wonder if that has a place in this new future. Whether or not third party plugins, themes, blocks, whatever it may be, whether there’s going to be scope for those. Maybe there’ll be an embargo on, well, it has to be in the repository. I don’t know. Again, just over to you, what are your thoughts?

[00:22:04] Jamie Marsland: Yeah, my view is a hundred percent, I want those in there. Because it’s one of the best things about WordPress, that we have 60,000 plugins and thousands of amazing themes. The challenge is how you do that without annoying the heck out of everybody that isn’t featured on that week. I want to find formats that we can showcase stuff without annoying people that aren’t on there.

But if you think about it, wordpress.org is already advertising all those 60,000 plugins, so we absolutely should be. And there’s some amazing stuff happening, some amazing innovation happening, so we definitely want to showcase that stuff on the official channel, is my view at the moment.

[00:22:34] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just curious about the cadence at which you are hoping to do this. Because at the moment, Jamie’s YouTube channel, I presume that there is importance in you getting content out on a regular basis to satisfy the algorithm. But it’s up you how often you want to do that. You know, you can take a week off here, a week off there, and go out for a walk or whatever, whenever you feel. And I’m just wondering how this is going to play. Do you have intuitions there? You know, it’s got to be several things a week, several things a day. It’s a big community after all, we could probably create that content. But, any thoughts?

[00:23:03] Jamie Marsland: Well, yeah, if you look, at the moment there’s tons of content going on it, but I think there’s too much content. I think the cadence will be, the first step is to get a content plan, which I’m going to share I think at this point, get a content plan together drawing on all those things that I’ve talked you through already.

And then I think the cadence drops out from that. Once you’ve got the content structure in terms of those groups, and then you’ve got the formats flowing from those. So like we’ve already got developer hours who have a certain cadence. And then you’ve got the content plan from that, the cadence will be dropping out from that. But my view is at least two a week.

But probably, as we start to power the engine many more. And, you know, the other thing that we want to do far more of is repurposing this content for like social media, because at the moment that’s not really happening. Once we get the source content the way we want it, that’ll be much, much easier. Because that’s been a lot of the growth of my channel, is resharing relentlessly on Twitter, and Facebook, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn especially at moment, actually.

[00:23:55] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve obviously been making content recently, and I presume you’re doing that because you enjoy it. Is there any part of you which is a little bit nervous about the fact that you are going to have this more managerial role and, you know, taking care of other people’s content, and less time in the video editor, making the content, thinking about the topics, and creating the titles and the thumbnails and all that? They’ll presumably be handled by you, but also by other people. Is there a bit of you, which is, I don’t know, a little bit sad at waving goodbye to your own endeavors?

[00:24:20] Jamie Marsland: I’m not waving goodbye to them. So my own channel is going to carry on. And actually this will probably give me, well, it will give me more freedom to be a bit more, I’m going to be quite experimental, but probably more experimental on my own channel. So that’s definitely going to continue. I’ve paused sponsorships at the moment on that channel, just to avoid some conflicts of interest.

But I have to say, I did have pre-match nerves about two weeks ago when I first got the job. Because normally I wake up and I’ve got like a hundred ideas banging around my head for videos, and for about a week I literally had nothing going on in there. It was like a vacuum of ideas, which was a bit worrying. Thankfully they’re back.

So yeah, I’m so excited about being able to run a channel, and there’s all these amazing people that I can now, that I’m already chatting to about the stuff they’re already doing and how we can take it to the next level. So the community aspects are like incredibly exciting.

[00:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: So just to be clear, there’s no embargo on Jamie ceasing doing what Jamie’s doing already. You’ve got free reign to keep making your own content. You know, you’re a good custodian of that. You don’t create incendiary content and drop a bomb walk away, or at least that’s not what I’ve seen anyway.

[00:25:20] Jamie Marsland: I’ve been advocating for this, for WordPress, for three years on my own channel. So it’d be a bit weird if I stopped. I’ve got over 100,000 subscribers on that channel now, so it’d be a bit weird if I didn’t keep producing video content that kind of advertise WordPress on that channel because it’s got a big audience. The same with my Twitter and LinkedIn. I’ll use all those channels to help the wordpress.org channel as well.

[00:25:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if that puts you in a unique position at Automattic? Because I don’t know, I genuinely don’t know the answer to this, but I have some thoughts that when people join Automattic, there may be contractual things that they can and cannot do. And obviously in this case, you know, that probably doesn’t matter quite so much because it’s not like you’re doing two jobs. Your YouTube channel is presumably going to be in your evenings and weekends. It returns to being more of a hobby. There’s just a thought around that, whether people have, you know, mentioned that to you.

[00:26:06] Jamie Marsland: They have mentioned that to me. And it is a unique position, I’m not sure there’s any perfect scenario for it because if I hadn’t grown the channel, then I probably wouldn’t be good for the YouTube job, because I’ve got experience of running a YouTube channel. So it would be quite hard to run this. And then people would say, well, why are you running the YouTube channel if you’ve never run a YouTube channel before? That’s kind of a difficult one.

And also it is unique because, if you think about it, Automatticians obviously tweet and make videos on their own channels, you wouldn’t expect them not to do that because they’re tweeting. To answer you, it is a unique thing. I’m not sure there’s any easy answer to it, apart from I’m hopefully helping WordPress in everything I’m doing. That’s been the sole point of my own channels, is to advocate strongly for WordPress over the last three years. So I’ve kind of been doing this job for free until recently, when I started taking sponsorships for a while. It feels like a continuation that, but just on the official channel actually.

[00:27:00] Nathan Wrigley: When do you anticipate we’re going to see the beginnings of your endeavors here? So we’re recording this very early in September, 2024. You’re obviously doing the support role at Automattic, answering support tickets, just like every other Automattician did. And once that fortnight, two weeks is expired, presumably you’ll have your head turned onto this role. How long do you think we need to wait before we start seeing the ball rolling?

[00:27:23] Jamie Marsland: I’ve got two weeks rotation, and then we’ve got WordCamp US, which is very exciting. Come and check out the speed build on the 19th with Brian Coords and Amber Hinds, which is going to be an exciting one. I think we’re in the main room as well, so that could be huge if we are, that could be a big one.

So I suspect we’ll start seeing some changes around October. It’s important to do some groundwork first before just breaking everything. Although we could just break everything, and see how it goes. See how many people I can annoy within a shortest space of time. But I’m very impatient to get on and start improving things. But also incredibly excited because there’s so much cool stuff happening.

So if anyone’s got, you know, I’ve been asking people, if you’ve got anything exciting going on that you want to share with the world around WordPress, whether it’s innovative, fun, crazy, enterprise, beginner. I really want to hear your stories, so just send them to me.

[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you say send them to you, what’s the best way to do that?

[00:28:12] Jamie Marsland: Good question. So I’ve got an Automattic email, now this is very strange. Still don’t know what it is, I think it’s jamie.marsland@automattic.com, or just tweet me on Twitter at pootlepress. But yeah, just get in touch. Send me your ideas, I want as many ideas as possible.

[00:28:26] Nathan Wrigley: And if you’re listening to this in the year 2025, I presume you’re going to be heading to youtube.com/wordpress.

[00:28:32] Jamie Marsland: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

[00:28:35] Nathan Wrigley: I’m not entirely sure whether that’s the right URL, but I’ll make sure to find out, and link it into the show notes. So hopefully this episode will reach the airwaves prior to WordCamp US. And you are doing a speed build, and as you said, it’s Brian Coords. If you’re not familiar with Brian, I think it’s fair to classify him as developer. And you’ve also got Amber Hinds, and I think it’s fair to classify Amber as accessibility advocate.

I thought that was a really curious combination. And I wondered if that was very intentional in terms of two different outputs. If you’re following Brian, I’m presuming we’re going to see a focused on the front end, focused on the design, making it look accurate to whatever it is that you serve up. Whereas I was curious, you know, are we going to see Amber focusing on just getting the menu exactly right? Which may take the full half an hour with all the aria labels and things. Are you hoping for that?

[00:29:22] Jamie Marsland: I am hoping for that. I think it could be really interesting. But in the heat of panic, who knows what might happen. I think Brian’s been practicing as well. He’s done a live practice on YouTube, which I think shocked Amber a little bit. But yeah, I think it’ll be a really interesting combination to see the two different approaches. And I still haven’t chosen the website, so if anyone’s got any ideas for that.

[00:29:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’s Ling’s Cars, let’s be honest. It’s not going to be Ling’s Cars. Okay, well, that genuinely is everything that I’ve got to ask you today. So, Jamie Marsland, all the best. First of all, massive congratulations. Your endeavors have not gone unrecognised by just about everybody in the community. The quality of what you’ve been doing has been second to none, and utterly deserved position. And I hope it proves to be everything that you wish it to be. Well done.

[00:30:03] Jamie Marsland: Thank you so much, Nathan. Good to talk.