Lightning Talks: Doing it Right (Zack Tollman, Joe Dolson) #wcsf14

The second session I manged to attend (after one was postponed due to an emergency drill included two “Lightning Talks: Doing it Right”
A Look at WordPress Performance by Zack Tollman (@wired)

• Official description: While site performance is an important topic in the WordPress community, how are we really doing at maintaining fast websites in the real world? In my talk, I will attempt to answer this question by examining a large sample of performance data from actual websites. With this information, I will suggest areas of improvement for the community in an effort to improve performance for WordPress
• How performant is WordPress?
• Is it terrible? we all got a poor performance
• You can get “C+” with the right service; noone says A+
• Objectively? testing real sites
• We have data at http archive. Scrapes the top 300K sites twice a month
• He got the data and cmopared WP and non WP sites
• Looked at 290K sites, 20% of those are WP
• WP was slower at every sense
• Why?
• WP issues more http requests, more redirects, more DNs lookups
• How can we do better?
• 1. Start with education.
• Performance is everybody’s issue, not just developers.
• 2. New core features
• 3. Performance culture: We have something that big companies don’t: our community controls 23% of the web.
• Imagine if we really care about performance.
• QA:
  • Cannot know whether slowness was due to plugins or themes.
  • Performance got better in WP over the years, but we have more libraries (e.g. jquery). Depends on how you use them.

 
Good Habits: Coding for Accessibility by Joe Dolson

• Official description: Web accessibility isn’t a collection of check boxes; it’s a way of thinking about web development. This talk will outline development habits for building WordPress sites that provide a consistent and reliable experience for everyone.
• Is accessibility hard?
• It is, but it is not hard to start.
• How to make it easy?
  • Buttons should be button elements <button>
  • Links are <a>
  • Images are meaningless. They worth a 100 words only if you can see them. Communicate in text. Assisted technology reads the page
  • Label. All. The. Things. – Form needs labels. A placeholder is not a label.
  • Focus, focus – who’s got the focus? Not all people who use assisted technology are blind. Needs to be visible focus. Assign focus and
• How to make it hard?
  • Blame the technology. Assisted tech has issues. You need to write good code.
  • Leave it for later. That’s a disaster waiting to happen.
• Don’t write code you know you’ll need to fix later.
• QA:
  • Government guidelines are a joke: written in 1998. Look at guidelines published by W3C
  • Hamburger icon needs to be labelled too. Core files is good in WP
  • Are there tools to rate accessibility testing? yes, a lot of them. Need to test the rendered DOM. Hard to do pre-commit testing. WAVE tool is good.
  • https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/