One thing I love to learn about is accessibility. For me, it is about being inclusive, but there is more to it, like being a competitive advantage or seeing your project from new perspectives.
When I was in design I noticed most designers do not care about accessibility. Very simple things to check like having an appropriate colour contrast — which the default colour palette of the NewDev block theme does indeed have— are often dismissed. Now that I transitioned to development, I am disappointed to see how for developers accessibility is rarely a priority or even a concern. Even worse, it is often looked at as a design issue — or being honest, the designer’s problem.
This blows my mind because developers are usually heavy users and early adopters of a lot of products. They are probably the larger group of people to use keyboard navigation to make their work faster, easier, and more efficient. But the proportion of developers that take accessibility into account in the projects they work on is very small.
Part of the problem is how we usually approach the issue. We focus only on people with disabilities when issues like proper size and contrast, or keyboard navigation affect a greater part of the population. This pairs up with otherness, which is a huge problem.
And if we are being completely honest, there is also the other otherness: we usually make products for users instead of people. It is easier when users are considered a different kind to be less empathic, and to care less.
Fortunately, the WordPress community does an amazing job regarding accessibility, setting an amazing example. If you want to learn more and do more about it, get involved.