In October 2018, Rian Rietveld resigned as lead of the WordPress accessibility team. Her stated reason was blunt: “the last year, especially the last few weeks have been too politically complicated for me” (Rietveld, 2018). The complications were specific. Gutenberg, WordPress’s new block editor, was shipping features her team flagged as inaccessible, without a developer on the accessibility team who could fix the React code directly, and fixes that did land kept regressing in later updates. She addressed Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’s co-founder, directly: “talk to them, guide them, inform them” (Rietveld, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I selected Rietveld because Audrey Watters’ point about hidden histories has a second half that’s easy to miss: a resignation gets written up, but the years of unglamorous work that follow it rarely do. She said in 2018 she was “not leaving WordPress nor accessibility” (Rietveld, 2018), and nearly eight years later that’s held up in a form the resignation post couldn’t have predicted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In August 2026, Rietveld published an update on the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base, built after she found existing guidance “hard to find, scattered all around the place, with duplicated and incomplete information” across WordPress.org (Rietveld, 2026; WP Accessibility Knowledge Base, n.d.). That diagnosis is what matters most right now: the 2018 fight was institutional, and she’d lost it, but the documentation gap was something one contributor could still fix. A builder can’t learn to make something accessible if the standard is scattered across a dozen half-finished pages, and that matters more in 2026 than in 2018, since AI coding assistants now draw on that same guidance and can reproduce its gaps at the speed they generate code. Where the answer lives has quietly become the curriculum a whole field of self-taught builders learns from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rietveld, R. (2018, October 9). I have resigned as the WordPress accessibility team lead. Here is why.<\/em> Rian Rietveld. https:\/\/rianrietveld.com\/2018\/10\/09\/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress-accessibility-team\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Rietveld, R. (2026, August 6). One year of working on documentation about accessibility for WordPress.<\/em> Make WordPress Accessible. https:\/\/make.wordpress.org\/accessibility\/2026\/08\/06\/one-year-of-working-on-documentation-about-accessibility-for-wordpress\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n WP Accessibility Knowledge Base. (n.d.). Documentation about accessibility for WordPress users and creators.<\/em> https:\/\/www.wpaccessibility.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n For this assignment, I planned to use Claude (Anthropic) to identify candidates, fetch and verify primary sources, and produce a point-form collection of research for me to review and write my piece. I would then revise and take ownership of it, rather than writing something I would submit unread. My guardrail was specific to this assignment’s own warning that generative AI “invents scholars, institutional affiliations, and citations with considerable confidence.” The rule I set: no claim, quote, date, or link appears in the final post unless it was pulled from an actual page fetch of the source by me and verified across a minimum of two independent AI agents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In October 2018, Rian Rietveld resigned as lead of the WordPress accessibility team. Her stated reason was blunt: “the last year, especially the last few weeks have been too politically complicated for me” (Rietveld, 2018). The complications were specific. Gutenberg,… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":302,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/302"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0285\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}AI-uset)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n