Genesis Beta Released

Genesis Beta 2.2 will have the most extensive focus on Accessibility of any prior release and is now available as a public release. Things like better color contrast, keyboard navigation, and better screen reader support makes Genesis 2.2 more usable for your visitors and clients with disabilities.

But as with any feature that changes front end output, we’ve made this opt-in, so that your site doesn’t break when you upgrade. Here’s how to enable it in your child theme.

First, you’ll need to add the theme support for the accessibility features to your functions.php file.

https://gist.github.com/JohnBunka/972e7d9be3e90b615ba0

When you enable the accessibility features in your child theme, it will output special elements in your site’s markup to help disabled visitors navigate your site. But you don’t want these elements to be visible to your entire audience. So we’ll need some special CSS that will deliver these elements to the users who need them, but not to the ones who don’t.

https://gist.github.com/JohnBunka/cbbc6f4e8c99fdc1d29e

 

Testing out the Genesis Beta

We always recommend testing betas on a non-production site.

Ways to test a beta

• Create a staging site, ie staging.yourdomain.com
• Some hosts like Siteground or WPEngine have one-click staging site setups
• Use ServerPress https://serverpress.com/ to light up a local WP install to test things out

How to test out Genesis Beta

1. Install the Genesis Beta Tester plugin from the WordPress repo https://wordpress.org/plugins/genesis-beta-tester/
2. After the install it will show the update
3. Click the link to update
4. And that’s it
5. You can take this a step further and try out the new Genesis sample theme on github https://github.com/copyblogger/genesis-sample

[via StudioPress Blog, Nathan Rice Gists and Copyblogger Diffs]