Community Magazine 
When we introduced Joomla’s accessibility programme in the July issue of the Joomla Community Magazine, the project was just getting started. The organisational foundations were being put in place, the first milestone was underway, and the Joomla community was preparing for a programme that will run for the next 20 months.
Selection Committee and the Next Steps of the Joomla Accessibility Programme
Since then, things have moved quickly.
The first important decisions have been made, the Selection Committee has been elected, the first milestone has been completed, and work on the next milestone has begun. The project is now moving from planning and assessment towards concrete implementation.
Selection Committee Elections
The Selection Committee election took place from 22nd to 29th June 2026. With the election completed, the project now has its community-elected Selection Committee in place.
With the Selection Committee established, another important piece of the project organisation has also been completed.
Meet the Selection Committee
The Selection Committee has a very specific but important role in the programme: its members are responsible for evaluating proposals and selecting the contractors who will carry out the individual milestones.
The committee brings together people with different backgrounds and areas of expertise from across the Joomla community. This broad range of experience helps ensure that proposals are evaluated from different perspectives.
Tom van der Laan
Tom has been working with Joomla for many years and has a background in web design, development, graphics and photography. He is also active in several Joomla teams, including Marketing, CMS Release and Organization.
His combination of practical web experience and long-standing involvement in the Joomla community provides a valuable perspective when evaluating contractor proposals.
Laura Gordon
Laura has worked with Joomla since 2005 and has particular experience building and maintaining websites for public libraries. As a web developer at Rutgers University, she is involved with a large number of Joomla websites and brings additional expertise in User Experience Design. Laura is involved with the Joomla User Group team and she has been coordinating events with JoomlaNYC, JoomlaUsers NJ, and JoomlaDayUSA since 2009.
Her experience connects Joomla development with the needs of large institutional websites and their users.
Nicola Galgano
Nicola is a long-time Joomla contributor with extensive experience in testing and quality assurance. He has been involved with the Bug Squad and Automated Testing Team and has also served as a Vice President of Open Source Matters.
His technical and testing background provides an important perspective when assessing the capabilities and approaches presented by contractors.
Yannick Gaultier
Yannick has been working professionally in web development since 2009 and is the founder of Weeblr, where he develops Joomla extensions and other web-related software.
His long experience as a Joomla extension developer provides the committee with a perspective from the professional Joomla extension ecosystem.
Stefan Wendhausen
Stefan is one of Joomla’s long-standing contributors and first got involved with Mambo back in 2002. Today, he is active in several key areas of Joomla, including as team lead of the CMS Release Team and as a member of the CMS Maintenance Team. In addition to his role as Release Manager for versions 6.1 and 7.0, he also leads the Core Language Team.
Stefan also has a long-standing interest in accessibility and has previously written about web accessibility for Joomla.de.
Emmanuel Lemor
Emmanuel has been building sites in Joomla exclusively since 2005 and brings another perspective from within the Joomla community and is also a member of the Selection Committee. His experience within Open Source Matters and the Joomla project complements the technical and community backgrounds of the other committee members.
Together, the six members form the group responsible for assessing the proposals received for the individual milestones and selecting the contractors who will carry out the work.
Milestone 1a: Understanding Where We Are
The first milestone of the programme focused on establishing a clear picture of Joomla’s current accessibility situation.
Before improvements can be systematically implemented, it is important to understand where the existing product stands, what already works well, where the biggest problems are, and which areas should receive priority.
Milestone 1a has now been completed and has provided the project with that important foundation.
“Starting such an accessibility programme is a massive effort, and it has been a real challenge to lay down all the fundamentals in this first milestone in a way that will support future work. Luckily, the team here at Axess Lab is incredibly dedicated and knowledgeable, which ensured that we could deliver in time despite summer vacations and heatwaves”, says Eric Eggert, Senior Accessibility Specialist at Axess Lab. “The web is not a read-only medium, and participation of disabled people in writing and publishing content is paramount. While we have found a number of accessibility issues and some users could not complete tasks in user testing due to accessibility barriers, this was nothing out of the extraordinary for such a complex project. In many views, the previous efforts also payed dividents with only minor issues found.”
The findings from this first assessment are not intended to simply become another report that sits on a shelf. They are the starting point for the next phase of the programme.
Milestone 1b: Turning Findings into Action
The next milestone takes the findings from 1a and turns them into a concrete plan of action.
AccessOne, led by Michael Beganyi, has been selected to carry out Milestone 1b.
“It is a great honour to be a part of the Joomla Accessibility Project by completing this critical milestone that will inform future work. I remember using Joomla in 2006; and being able to contribute to a system I used so early in my career is almost poetic for me. Open source is at the heart of sovereign tech in our modern world, and by contributing to this space I feel I’m propagating the possibilities for all users of Joomla to express themselves and become content authors. Having more accessible resources means more reach and participation, which means greater diversity and representation. I think we can all support that!” says Michael Beganyi
The focus of this milestone is to translate the findings of the initial assessment into a prioritised remediation backlog. This will help identify which accessibility issues should be addressed first and provide a clear basis for the work that follows.
An important part of this process is also the identification and implementing quick wins improvements that can be made relatively quickly while the larger, more complex work is being planned.
Milestone 1b is scheduled to run from 1 September to 31 October 2026.
This makes it an important bridge between the assessment phase and the implementation work that follows.
From Assessment to Implementation
The overall programme is deliberately structured so that the individual milestones build on each other.
The first phase is about understanding the current situation. The next step is to prioritise the work. From there, the subsequent milestones will address accessibility across different parts of Joomla — including the design system and core components, frontend and backend templates, authoring experiences, administration features, automated accessibility testing, developer documentation and more.
The programme will ultimately conclude with an external audit and the finalisation and handover of the results.
Rather than trying to solve everything at once, the programme therefore follows a clear progression:
Understand → Prioritise → Improve → Test → Verify
What Comes Next?
At the time of writing, the Selection Committee is in discussions with applicants for Milestones 2, 7 and 8. The selection process is expected to be completed in September.
What is already clear, however, is that the project has moved beyond the initial planning phase.
The first milestone has given the project a better understanding of Joomla’s current accessibility landscape. Milestone 1b will turn that knowledge into a prioritised plan, and the milestones that follow will progressively turn that plan into improvements in Joomla itself.
The goal is not simply to produce accessibility reports or recommendations. The goal is to make Joomla itself more accessible and to make accessibility an increasingly integral part of how Joomla is developed.
There is still a lot of work ahead, but the programme is now underway in earnest.
And the first results are in.
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