WPLDN - July 2026: Our 150th Event! Accessibility, Identity & the Agentic Web
Join us for the 150th WPLDN event. One hundred and fifty evenings of free, community-driven WordPress talks feels worth marking, so we're doing it with three sessions rather than the usual two. We're covering whether WordPress dropdown menus can ever be truly accessible, the business case for understanding why you do what you do, and what happens to your site when the visitor is an AI agent rather than a person. 📅 Date: July 30, 2026 ⏰ Time: 6:30 PM BST (doors open at 6:00 PM) 🎟️ Cost: Free (Registration required) Session 1: WordPress dropdown menus - Can they be truly accessible? 🤝 Speaker: Graham Armfield (Coolfields Consulting) If your site has more than a handful of pages, you're almost certainly using dropdown or flyout submenus. WordPress themes have offered a whole range of approaches over the years, but how many of them actually work for everyone? Graham will walk through the patterns commonly found in WordPress themes and assess the level of accessibility each one provides. Expect a clear-eyed look at what passes, what doesn't, and what to do about it. Graham is a Web Accessibility Consultant and the founder of Coolfields Consulting, where he tests websites for accessibility and advises designers and developers on fixing the issues found. He writes and delivers detailed accessibility training for developers, is a WordPress developer who has built accessible sites for clients large and small, and has contributed to the Make WordPress Accessible Team. He's spoken on accessibility at WordCamps and WordPress events for years, and he's been part of the WPLDN story for a good chunk of those 150 events. Outside of work, you'll likely find him playing guitar, recording his next album, or at a local open mic night. Session 2: Owning Your Why: The Only Constant in a World of Change 🤝 Speaker: Raquel Manriquez (PressConf) The only constant in your business isn't the strategy, the stack, or the team. It's the "why" underneath them. In this candid session, Raquel starts with the question most of us avoid: Who am I actually? and moves to the business case for answering it. The boundaries that hold because you know what you're protecting. The decisions that come quickly because you're not weighing up other people's opinions of you. The steadiness that comes from being someone, rather than just doing things. Raquel is the founder of WonderlandCurious, a tech event consultancy focused on innovative, people-first experiences. A longtime leader in the WordPress ecosystem, she founded the WooCommerce agency Mode Effect and led it for a decade before a successful exit in 2020. Today she channels that community experience into PressConf, a conference built around candid, unrecorded conversations among the leaders shaping the WordPress economy. A perpetually curious soul, Raquel believes deeply in the power of meaningful connection wherever her feet land. Outside of work, she's a recent graduate of full-time parenthood and enjoys music, the outdoors, wanderlust, and time with her big, Indigenous family. Session 3: Preparing WordPress sites for the agentic web 🤝 Speaker: Daphne Monro (Hosting.com) AI agents don't just rank pages. They call APIs, parse structured data, evaluate trust signals, and increasingly complete actions on behalf of users. Daphne explores what that shift means for WordPress: exposing clean, structured data through schema and feeds, building product and shopping setups that are machine-readable, keeping APIs and endpoints stable and well documented, and preparing content for retrieval, summarisation, and transaction. The focus is on building sites that agents can confidently interpret, cite, and act through, not just crawl, and positioning brands for a web where software is often the primary interface. Daphne is Head of Website and Content at Hosting.com, where she leads website performance, SEO, CRO, migrations, and global content strategy across multiple brands. She specialises in large-scale domain migrations, technical SEO
