Matt Mullenweg has called for the reversal of WordPress accessibility improvements proposed by longtime contributor Andrea Fercia six years ago, and also told Fercia to take his talents to another project.
Fercia’s account was temporarily locked, and Mullenweg later apologised for the incident on the WordPress Core Slack channel, explaining that the account lock had not been meant to happen.
Accessibility commit reverted after Matt Mullenweg’s call
Andrea Fercia opened WordPress Trac ticket #50486 six years ago to address accessibility issues with admin notices in the WordPress administration interface. The proposed improvements aimed to help users, including those relying on assistive technologies, identify and navigate these notices.
After the changes were committed, Matt Mullenweg called for their reversal, writing, “Please revert all of this.” He also addressed Fercia directly, stating, “you no longer hold any WordPress.org positions or titles or authority, and are invited to contribute your talents to another project.”
WordPress core committer Joe Dolson subsequently committed the reversal, explaining that “Following merge, it became evident that the complexity of notices as handled in the WordPress admin make this change premature.” He said the changes worked for standard notices but that unusual cases meant they were not sufficiently ready for production.
The ticket was then moved from the WordPress 7.2 milestone to Future Release.
Andrea Fercia’s contributions and temporary account lock
Fercia has been a WordPress Core Committer since 2015 and was a member of the WordPress Accessibility Team. He contributed to 33 WordPress releases and worked at Yoast as an accessibility specialist and senior frontend engineer from March 2016 to May 2026.
Following Mullenweg’s comments on the Trac ticket, Fercia’s account was temporarily locked.
Mullenweg later addressed the incident in the WordPress Core Slack channel, apologising for the account lock and clarifying that it was not supposed to happen.
Previous tensions between Mullenweg and the Accessibility Team
Mullenweg has also publicly challenged decisions made by the WordPress Accessibility Team on other occasions. In August 2026, he responded to an announcement extending the deadline for updated accessibility requirements for WordPress themes, declaring that the work was “permanently delayed” and saying the team had “overstepped its authority, usefulness, and charter.”
Mullenweg also stated, “Going forward, any other team or committer can override suggestions or requests from current accessibility team members.”
In a separate incident in October 2024, Dolson announced that Accessibility Team meetings had been suspended because neither of the team’s two representatives could log in to WordPress.org.
Dolson explained in the comments that one representative was uncertain about checking the WP Engine box, while the other had been removed from Slack and was also unwilling to check it. Mullenweg responded by asking, “We should find some new team reps to replace them, do you have any suggestions?”
Tensions around WordPress accessibility also date back to the development of the Gutenberg editor. In 2018, Rian Rietveld, then-lead of the WordPress Accessibility Team, announced her resignation, saying the previous year, particularly the preceding weeks, had become “too politically complicated.”
In her resignation post, Rietveld raised concerns about accessibility issues in Gutenberg, including difficulties contributing fixes, accessibility improvements being broken by later changes, and new functionality not being tested with a keyboard before implementation. She also cited feedback from accessibility testers who found significant issues with the editor.
Addressing Matt Mullenweg directly, Rietveld urged him to take better care of the WordPress community, asking him to value contributors who dedicated their own time to the project rather than ignore or make fun of them, and to engage with, guide and support them.
Community response
Duane Storey questioned why contributors continued to work on the project, writing that he “genuinely” did not know why people were still contributing.
Earle Davies also criticised Mullenweg’s actions, describing them as another attack on accessibility and expressing concern about the impact on the WordPress community, writing, “sad day for WordPress”
Courtney Robertson thanked Fercia for his long-standing contributions to WordPress, writing that it had been “It’s been a privilege knowing someone who has consistently advocated for the accessibility needs of the WordPress project because it’s simply the right thing to do.”
Responding to Mullenweg’s comments, Robertson said the Trac ticket documented years of collaboration, code review, testing, and technical disagreements, adding, “But technical disagreements alone are not grounds for publicly stripping someone of their standing in a project.” Robertson also questioned what policies and processes had been followed, and told Fercia, “You’ve made WordPress better, and you’ve helped make the web more accessible.”
Taco Verdonschot, Fercia’s friend and former colleague at Yoast, also spoke out in support of him, describing the day as “sad” and saying Fercia had been “publicly attacked and humiliated” by Matt Mullenweg.
Verdonschot criticised the handling of complaints involving senior figures in the project, saying that although WordPress has a Code of Conduct and an Incident Response Team, “when that co-founder is the bully, no action is taken.”