October 18, 2026
Dear Mr. Mullenweg,
I am writing to you publicly as a blind daily screen reader user, an IAAP Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA), and the publisher of Blind Access Journal. Many of our readers, and many of my professional colleagues, are authors, creators, publishers, developers and site owners with disabilities who rely on WordPress every day. I am choosing to make this letter public because the decisions at issue were made in public, they affect a very large community of people, and that community deserves to hear your answers directly.
My concern is your recent action on WordPress Trac ticket #50486, “Improve the admin notices accessibility”, and what it signals about the future of accessibility in WordPress.
What the Ticket Was Meant to Fix
Ticket #50486 was opened in 2020 to address a basic barrier. Admin notices in WordPress carry no semantics that identify them to assistive technology. When a notice appears, a screen reader user is not told about it, and a keyboard user has no way to move directly to it. In practice, people like me can miss confirmations, warnings and errors that sighted users see at a glance.
The ticket was postponed through many release cycles. Earlier this month, a modest fix was finally committed. It placed notices in a navigable landmark and added a notice count to the page title, which is the first thing a screen reader announces when a page loads. After six years, it represented real progress.
What Happened Next
The change surfaced legitimate technical problems, including notice counts appearing on the Dashboard and in the block editor when no notices were visible, and contributors were actively working through fixes. Refining or reverting an imperfect change is a normal part of software development, and the revert commit that followed explained its technical reasoning clearly. My concern is not that the work was revised. My concern is how the decision was made and what accompanied it.
Your first comment on this six-year-old accessibility ticket was an instruction to revert all of the work. In the same comment, you told Andrea Fercia that he no longer holds any WordPress.org positions or authority and was “invited to contribute your talents to another project.” No technical reasoning was offered on the ticket. As reported by The Repository on October 16, you later said in WordPress Slack that you were simply no longer interested in his contributions. I acknowledge that you also apologized for the temporary locking of his account and said that was not your intent.
Mr. Fercia has contributed to 33 WordPress releases, has been a core committer for a decade, and is one of the most experienced accessibility specialists the project has had. Removing him in this way, on an accessibility ticket and in the middle of active collaboration on that ticket, sends an unmistakable signal to disabled users and to the people who advocate for us.
A Pattern That Concerns Our Community
This does not stand alone. In August, you declared that the Accessibility Team had overstepped its authority, usefulness and charter, and that any other team or committer could override its suggestions. In 2025, you proposed developing accessibility improvements as a canonical plugin rather than in core. Taken together, these actions make it difficult for disabled users to know whether accessibility remains a core value of WordPress or is now treated as an obstacle to progress.
Accessibility cannot be optional for the people who need it. When it lives outside core, or depends on the standing of individual advocates, people with disabilities are the ones left behind.
The effect on contributors matters too. Several respected members of the WordPress community have said publicly that they feel unable to speak freely about these events. A project that depends on volunteer and sponsored contributions cannot build accessible software if the people doing that work fear the consequences of doing it.
Important Questions
In the spirit of openness that the WordPress project has long championed, I respectfully ask you to answer the following questions publicly:
- Do you consider accessibility a core requirement of WordPress, on equal footing with performance, security and usability, rather than an optional enhancement?
- What is your plan, and the expected timeline, for making admin notices perceivable and navigable for screen reader and keyboard users, now that the work on ticket #50486 has been moved to a future release?
- What authority and role will the Accessibility Team hold going forward, and how will its expertise be incorporated into decisions that affect disabled users?
- What process and criteria were applied in removing Andrea Fercia’s roles, and what process will govern similar decisions in the future, consistent with the project’s Code of Conduct?
- What commitment can you make to authors, creators, developers and site owners with disabilities that the tools they depend on will remain accessible to them?
An Invitation to Respond
WordPress powers a large share of the web, and its choices shape what millions of people, including millions of people with disabilities, can read, publish and build. Clear answers would go a long way toward restoring trust. Should you choose to respond, Blind Access Journal will publish your response in full and without edits, so our readers can hear directly from you.
To our readers, and to everyone in the WordPress community who shares these concerns: I encourage you to read The Repository’s reporting and the ticket history for yourselves, and to add your voice respectfully and constructively.
Sincerely,
Darrell Hilliker, CPWA
Publisher, Blind Access Journal