Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
I'm here today with Troy Chaplin,
a front-end developer,
a WordPress engineer,
one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada,
and also the author, I believe,
of the block accessibility validation
plugin on WordPress.org that checks
whether your Gutenberg blocks are
accessible or not.
Welcome to the show, Troy.
Hey, thanks for having me on, Chris.
Yeah, no worries.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and
what you do with WordPress.
I grew up in a small town in
Newfoundland.
I found I was always involved in something
creative, whether it be art, design,
drawing.
I drew constantly on walls and all kinds
of stuff.
So as I got older,
I started to get into what ended up
becoming graphic design.
I spent the first ten years of my
career being a graphic designer and doing
a lot of print production materials,
books, magazines.
You name it, I probably did it.
um but halfway through that point in my
career i realized that that print was
probably not going to be my future so
i decided to start teaching myself web and
a friend of mine had told me quite
early on he had discovered wordpress and
he said to me this is probably and
he said to me look i found this
really cool thing called wordpress and i
think it might be something big we should
kind of follow this
And a couple of years after that,
I got lucky to go and join my
friend at Carleton University as a web
developer.
And we started the transformation across
campus,
moving away from a legacy content
management system into a custom built
WordPress enterprise solution.
That's awesome.
Yeah,
I spent a lot of my early development
career being afraid to call myself a
developer.
I refer to myself as a web designer,
not a developer,
because I also was way more into the
like, graphical side of things.
I taught myself HTML,
but I didn't really consider that coding.
I took, like,
graphic design and things in college,
and I was more, like, interested in that.
But then I discovered by accident, really,
that because I had a...
I started learning WordPress also,
and there's a point at which I...
I was working with a local web designer
who needed a back-end developer to do this
thing for a site that he was building
because he was really just front-end
focused.
When I didn't have to worry about the
design stuff,
I realized that I really liked doing the
work a lot more.
because you don't have to follow all of
the trends.
And that was a thing that my partner
and I were freelancing.
And that was a thing that was kind
of a struggle is like the web design
trends were always changing.
We wanted to kind of put our own
sort of mark on the sites that we
built,
but also we needed to like pay attention
to what other sites were doing and looking
like.
And when I didn't have to make those
calls, it made my job a lot easier.
Yeah,
design is a tough business because
everybody's got their opinion.
And
know they all can look at something and
and tell you exactly what they like and
what they don't like and you know it's
not always rooted in design principles and
it it makes it really tough for myself
myself i don't really think i was the
best designer um i just had the
understanding and i could take a design
and i could create five other templates
with it so that's where my strengths were
and that's something that i leaned on
quite heavily as i made the transition
from a graphic designer into a web
developer
I got the opportunity to work with a
really great web designer and it made my
life easier by being able to take those
templates and kind of just build them out
into something bigger.
But I really definitely enjoy the coding
side of it more like taking those designs,
seeing it come to life on page,
seeing how users would interact with it
and how they felt about the site and
what their feedback was,
was really exciting to me at the time.
Being able to take something that came
from my head and then put it out
into the world and seeing people use it
was really interesting to me.
Yeah.
Talk about a little bit about what it's
like the needs or demands of working
within sort of the EDU space,
because I know that there's a lot of
very sort of specific things that
educational institutions are like very
focused on and interested in that aren't
necessarily the same as like a regular
education.
quote-unquote regular website or like an
enterprise website actually there's some
probably correlations with enterprise
websites in some degrees um but like I
know that the edo space edu space is
a very sort of uh world unto itself
yeah I guess there's just several areas
like the world that I work within I
look at it as as a typical agency
style environment where you know
while we do have one main brand and
one template that we try to adhere to
at all times there's eight hundred
different sites and at least eight over or
definitely over a thousand content editors
and they all have different things they
want different needs so
I treat them as individual clients.
And I think that's the best approach where
we look at what their needs are.
Now,
I think what it makes us a bit
different from enterprise is that you work
with that one client,
but we have to take that information back
and figure out,
is this something that can be used for
a wider audience?
And then what would those requirements be?
And how can we make it so we
don't build one-off things all over the
place?
And how can we leverage it for more
goals?
And is that collection of eight hundred
sites,
is that eight hundred individual single
site WordPress installations or is that
one massive WordPress multi site or is it
like a combination of the two?
So for many years we were doing single
installations.
I think at some point we got to
maybe two hundred or so,
two hundred and fifty sites and realized
that
maintaining these individual installations
with individual file folders was not going
to be sustainable for much longer.
We looked at a bunch of different
solutions,
like DeployHQ was a really good one for
us where that was able to deploy from
GitHub and push up to our servers and
it handled it.
But again, it was slow.
The process would take almost a full day,
if not overnight.
Myself and a colleague, Mike,
had developed a tool called WordPress
multi-tenant.
So we took WordPress and we built a
multi-tenant application with it.
So we leveraged Composer.
So we were handling all the installation
through Composer.
At the time,
not a lot of premium plugins offered the
ability to download with Composer.
So we had started just maintaining our own
repos with a Composer file to make our
lives easier.
And then through the use of symlinks,
we were able to create an environment
where we had one centralized set of
resources from WordPress to the plugins to
our themes.
But then each of the individual sites
would use a symlink to point to where
that centralized location was.
So we still maintained individual
databases and individual installations for
each site,
but we finally were able to move into
a singular code base.
And that significantly improved our
working life and our workflow and
everything that comes with that.
Um, now though, with our more modern, um,
setup, we ha we're moving into a, a,
a hybrid theme.
We're not ready for block themes just yet,
but we're moving into a hybrid theme.
It's all Gutenberg powered.
We've decided to go multi-site with that
one.
So we're currently going through a process
of migrating those eight hundred and
something sites into our new multi-site
environment.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Um.
Is there, do you have,
do you have like,
when you're working with content editors,
I know, so like, at Pantheon,
one of the things that we do is
we have this concept of upstreams,
which is similar to sort of like the
thing that you were talking about,
where it's like,
it's basically you have a centralized
repository,
you maintain that central code repository,
you can put
whatever sort of base plugins and things
that you want in there,
and then each site within that uses that
upstream can also have their own custom
code.
And for a long time,
Pantheon was really pushing people toward
upstreams instead of multi-site.
And then I kind of said,
don't do that.
Because there's a need.
There's two different needs, right?
And the way that I ultimately...
articulated the difference between that
kind of an architecture and multi-site is
where if a singular database with
overlapping users and a shared ability to
pull up content from different sites,
if that is a single database home for
all of the data,
is a feature and not a bug,
then that's a good argument for
multi-site.
But if you want distinct stacks with
separate governance over data and users
and whatever,
then it's better to do that as sort
of a single WordPress site.
Do you see that sort of same kind
of tension too when you're working with,
especially because I know that in some
cases, not all, but in some cases,
particularly under the EDU umbrella,
they do want to have really distinct data
governance and like, no,
we don't want our users touching those
users over there, even if they're like,
even if they're only touching sort of
superficially, like just, you know,
shared database,
but like not accessing those sites.
Yeah, so in our environment,
everything that we are doing,
at least in this current multi-site,
is public-facing.
So we don't really get into the
conversations of the data that's in the
database from that level.
We do actually have a setup in place
where we build security groups that work
with our Active Directory.
And then,
so if I add you into a security
group, you have access to sites A, B,
and C,
but that's the limit of where you can
go.
We also leverage editor roles.
So at least when you log in there,
you don't have access to everything an
admin have.
And that's a wise choice to make sure
that folks that don't really truly
understand what plugins and themes do and
what they're for,
they don't need to understand that.
We like to curate that editor experience a
lot too.
So that way,
at least someone who's coming in can get
in,
get what they need to do done as
quickly as they can,
and then move out and go on to
all the other things they need to do
during their day.
So HumanMaid worked with WP Campus over
the summer to build out a sort of
a state of WordPress in higher education
report.
And one of the results of that that
I distinctly remember and have been
thinking about basically ever since is the
amount of sort of training that teams need
to do
and this could be whatever development
team,
whoever is touching WordPress the most,
those teams need to do a significant
amount of training to the actual users of
the site.
Just getting people familiar with and
comfortable working with WordPress.
Do you see that as well at Carleton?
Absolutely.
It's definitely a critical piece.
I don't feel it's good for us to
provide folks with a site and not at
least give them some sort of an intro
sort of overview tutorial,
provide solid documentation.
We're really big on video tutorials.
So our process right now is when someone
gets a site,
we do offer them some training,
whether it be them one-on-one or if they
have a small group within their department
or their unit that needs to manage
content.
So we do offer that.
We also have a great site that offers
a lot of written tutorials.
And then we do a lot of video
tutorials on top of that.
And the person on my team, Charlotte,
who had put all of that information
together made a really nice flow.
So it's almost like
course style where you come in you start
with like the first section you move your
way deeper you get into the advanced stuff
so she's really tailored something that
you can follow along as if you're taking
a course so i feel those are really
important things for our end users to make
sure that that they're comfortable but i
also find that that by doing good training
and offering good documentation it will
reduce the amount of support we have to
do
Right, yeah.
Did you ever look at,
or at least during your time,
has your team looked at other CMSs?
Like, has Drupal ever been on the table?
I don't think so.
I mean, I kind of came into Carlton,
I came here in,
and at that time there was already a
project in place to start moving, um,
a few sites, those things, six sites,
I believe into WordPress to do a pilot
project.
So at that time,
like whatever decisions were made were
already made before I kind of came on
board.
Um,
so I don't really know how that came
about.
Yeah.
Talk about Switchgears and talk about a
little bit your involvement in WordCamp
Canada.
How did that come about?
And maybe, I guess,
what's a little bit different from your
perception about the Canadian WordPress
community that would be distinct from...
you know,
the rest of the North American WordPress
community or other parts of the WordPress
ecosystem besides your boots and A's?
I got involved.
I mean,
I was an organizer for WordCamp Ottawa for
several years before COVID happened.
So now when all that sort of kind
of
I can't say went away,
but when COVID wasn't the hot topic
anymore and camp started to come back,
there was a few folks from previous
WordCamp Ottawa organizing teams that got
together and they wanted to put on
WordCamp Ottawa.
So after going to that last year and
talking to some of the organizers and some
old friends there, and I said,
I'm interested in helping out next year.
What can I do?
And then the call for new organizers came
out and I submitted and
You know,
I wasn't able to make it to that
first meeting,
but I think they had already had an
understanding that I was already committed
at that point.
So I remember getting a follow up.
I believe it was from Shanta within a
couple of days after that.
And she said, Yeah, congratulations,
you're part of the team.
And, you know,
we just kind of went from there.
What brought you into the original
WordCamp Ottawa group in the first place?
What drew you to to the WordPress
community in that way?
I think it was just wanting to get
involved,
wanting to meet new people and find
resources and get networking.
Like we were doing a lot of the
stuff at the times when we were learning
as well.
And you could go online and find all
those resources.
But there's also something about having
that connection to be able to just message
someone or have a chat with them and
get that information and exchange stories
and things.
To me, it's one thing to go online,
but I love communities like Slack,
like what we can do on Make and
what we can do on PostStatus and the
people that are there and the resources
you have.
Those are very invaluable.
So for me at that time,
I wanted to become a part of a
community and start to meet more people
who had similar interests to me.
The first WordCamp Ottawa happened at U of
O. Sorry, University of Ottawa.
I should clarify that.
And I actually got to speak at that
one.
I applied to speak and I got to
speak at that one.
And that was my first experience with a
local camp,
my first experience with speaking.
And I just wanted to become a part
of that moving forward.
It kind of goes back to,
I think about,
and I wrote a post on the WordCamp
Canada site about this,
about my first experience at a WordCamp.
And I got lucky and I went to
Toronto in two thousand and nine.
And that was my first camp experience.
And that was a really great experience.
Like,
I still have lasting friendships from that
camp.
And that was something that I really
picked up on quickly is that that the
friendships that you make in this
community
you know,
are very strong friendships and they will
be with you for a long time.
And that's one of the beauties of a
WordCamp.
Like I walk away from WordCamps not only
with knowledge,
but new friends that I know I can
reach out to and ask questions to at
any point.
And they're all going to be super helpful.
Yeah,
that was actually a thing that I wrote
about in my recap post for WordCamp
Canada,
was that it's been a number of years
since I've been to a WordCamp that wasn't
a big WordCamp,
that was a more local WordCamp.
And WordCamp Canada is kind of a weird
outlier,
we can talk about that in a second
too, but like,
It's still capped at like,
two-fifty people, right?
So like, something like that.
So it's still, compared to US or EU,
it's significantly smaller.
And that's about the size of WordCamp Salt
Lake City when I was running that.
That's probably where we sort of maxed out
at, is that sort of range.
And it...
The thing that I took away the most
from that was that it really felt like
all WordCamps to a degree for me at
this point,
since I've been around the WordPress
ecosystem for a long time,
feel like an opportunity to reconnect with
old friends,
people that I worked with at other
agencies, whatever.
But it really felt like,
because it was smaller,
it felt even more concentrated.
And it felt like, no,
these are people that I'm happy to spend
time with.
Even the new people,
even the people that I just met at
the event.
And that was one of the things that
I really took away from being at WordCamp
Canada.
From your perspective,
having organized or been involved in
WordCamp Ottawa and WordCamp Canada,
were there any differences in how the
Canadian WordCamp was organized versus the
Ottawa, the sort of local WordCamp?
Yeah, I think there was quite a few.
But before that,
there was a question that you had posed
a bit earlier about the differences
between a WordCamp in Canada versus a
WordCamp in the U.S.
Now,
I haven't gone to a lot of camps
outside of Canada.
I got to go to the last San
Fran, actually,
right before it became WordCamp U.S.
I was in San Francisco in twenty fourteen.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Nice.
So that was so large to me.
That was very overwhelming.
I come from a really small town.
Ottawa, I call it the big city,
but a little town.
It was a lot.
It was a lot to take in.
What I find the biggest difference is the
scale.
I find it, like you just mentioned,
coming to something like WordCamp with
less people,
it just felt more personal and you were
talking to some of the folks for longer
periods of time because you weren't
You know,
surrounded by like a couple thousand
people,
you're surrounded by a couple hundred
people.
So those conversations I find can get a
bit more intimate or they can go on
for longer because you're not trying to
figure out who do I need to go
see now or who can I go meet?
Oh, no,
that's that person over there that I want
to go see.
Right.
I just that's what I found from from
San Fran compared to what we do up
here in Canada.
Yeah.
Yeah,
I remember going to WordCamp San
Francisco, uh, and, uh, feeling, yes,
overwhelmed.
I had the, the deep sense that, like,
they, the,
there are people that I recognize their,
like, handles that I was, um,
like afraid to have a conversation with
because like this is a big important
person and I'm just like whatever.
So like there's a lot of imposter
syndrome.
Like there are people that I wanted to
talk to or introduce myself to,
but I was afraid to.
And that was also, I mean,
that was a long, long, long time ago.
And since then I did a bunch of
speaking and I was involved in Salt Lake
City and whatever.
But yeah, it was definitely like a lot,
it felt a lot harder to get into
that sort of mode of networking.
And I felt,
I think I almost felt like a failure
too,
like walking away from that and not having
those conversations.
Because I felt like this is your
opportunity to like,
you know,
get into the in crowd or whatever.
And like, you know, they're right there.
You can just say hi.
And it's like, no,
I am too much of a wallflower.
Like, you know,
like I'm very much of the, like,
like I, I'm like,
i get a lot out of being in
social situations but i also like if i
don't know people it's really hard for me
to like motivate myself to uh um to
get into to insert myself into a
conversation with with people that i just
have never sort of met in person or
met at all really um yeah so i
yeah go ahead
Yeah, I completely understand.
I find myself,
I'm awkward at best when it comes to
the majority of social situations.
So usually if it's a group of folks,
I'm a bit more comfortable if I know
at least one person in that group.
But I find going back to San Fran
twelve years ago versus even just WordCamp
just a couple of weeks ago,
You know,
I found like I really kind of opened
up and my ability to go and approach
some of those folks that probably would
have intimidated me twelve years ago.
Right.
You know,
that was so going back to San Fran,
I got the opportunity to meet Mark.
Is his last name pronounced Jaquif?
Jaquif, yeah.
Yeah.
So I got the chance to meet him
at one point.
I had a conversation with him.
And I think for me,
that was the eye opening moment.
And that was really towards the end of
the camp.
and but he was so friendly he was
so approachable and that to me was like
okay at that time him and like andrew
nason like those were like so the big
guys in in the wordpress world at that
time and for him to be very approachable
and really open to conversation and stuff
That showed me what this community was
really all about.
And there was really not a lot of
ego that you get from a lot of
other conferences and stuff like that.
So that made me really appreciate the
community that much more.
Now, fast forward into WordCamp Canada,
like we had a lot of big names
at that camp.
I mean,
Matt was at the camp and he was
very approachable as well.
You know,
there probably would have been a time and
place when I would not have wanted to
go and talk to some of those folks.
But, you know,
this time I relished that opportunity and
was really excited to meet some of the
names that we had coming in.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember Jaquith and Nason,
I remember seeing them across the room and
being too intimidated to talk to them.
So props to you,
props to you for actually opening the
conversation when I couldn't.
So you've been working on this Gutenberg
block accessibility validation plugin.
Tell me about how...
I mean, I imagine,
I think I can maybe even see where
the sort of origin story for this thing,
because if you're working at Carlton and
Carlton is concerned about accessibility,
then obviously your website needs to be
accessible and there needs to be a way
to inform
the users of the site that the site
isn't super accessible.
I imagine that is the use case for
how this emerged.
When did you decide that this was
something that you needed to work on and
build?
It was pretty early when we were building
our
our current Gutenberg implementation,
where the realization of how easy it was
to publish inaccessible content with
Gutenberg, it kind of,
it was a bit mind blowing to be
honest.
Like for example, the table block,
the fact that I can just throw a
table block on the page,
there's no header by default.
And at the time,
maybe it's changed in code, you know,
in the last year,
but at the time I was looking at
it,
there was not a way to force the
header on by default without doing a
variation block,
nor was there a way to remove that
option from the editor.
So there was always a way to allow
a table block to be published without a
header.
at one point i was there was i
was trying to figure out how how we
could you know tackle this stuff there was
really no validation in core that i knew
about at the time but i saw a
video by ryan welcher and he had been
talking about the post locking
functionality in core and the light bulb
turned on immediately i said how can i
check attributes in blocks
then block post publishing if they didn't
meet the accessibility requirements that
we have to adhere to in Canada.
So I started just to build this thing
on my own, trying to figure it out.
And one thing led to another and a
first iteration of a plugin came together
where I was checking, I think it was,
I started with the table block.
I added the button block because I wanted
to make sure that folks were not able
to publish buttons without text or a link.
And I also started working on images
because alt tags, in my opinion,
are one of the biggest misses as far
as accessibility goes.
Um, yeah,
and then I just kept working on this
plugin and, and, you know,
we had a different iteration of it
internally.
So there was some separation that had
happened there,
cuz we do things just a little bit
different.
Like we force it all internally and it's
all required.
Whereas the plugin that I'm building for
public consumption allows you as a content
editor to choose your level of, um,
I guess,
validation and what you want to validate.
So there's a big settings page and.
you know,
if you're not as concerned around, um,
heading levels or structures,
or if you don't care about the table
header,
you can turn it all off or you
can give warnings as a way to,
you know, at least educate folks,
but not block them from publishing,
or you can be as heavy handed as
we are at the university and just make
sure that folks just can't do it at
all.
Um,
Over the summer, though,
I think was the biggest thing I really
wanted to do with the plugin itself.
And I built a validation API, ultimately.
I like the idea that the plugin offered
the ability to validate some of the core
blocks.
But to me,
the big win was being able to allow
other developers to leverage all of the
stuff that I had already written in the
most simplistic of ways.
So I happened to go on vacation to
Newfoundland and my family were going to
bed a bit earlier.
So that gave me hours and hours at
night to just tinker with this stuff.
and i think in the course of a
two-week vacation i had built the majority
of this i called it at the time
the developer api and i started building
some of my own little plugins with it
to test it and and now it's a
fully functioning api and just a couple
days ago i extended that functionality to
now include post meta in the validation in
the same way um so yeah there's there's
some other stuff i want to do with
this plugin and i'm really just trying to
position it
as a really fantastic,
powerful validation API for developers.
Have you been getting any sort of feedback
or conversation around the plugin?
I know that when we talked in person,
you were talking about Joe Dolson,
who is very active in the WordPress
accessibility community,
had submitted some pull requests.
But have you been able to interact with
people that are using it?
Not as much as I would like to.
And I find that is one of the
hardest parts about this world right now,
because there's so many options.
There's a lot of great accessibility tools
out there.
So it's hard to catch the attention.
And, you know,
I'm not really a well-known person either.
So again, it's, you know,
I'm already fighting that uphill battle.
Now I did get some really great feedback
from some folks like Joe, you mentioned,
for example,
had saw the plugin and submitted a few
feature requests.
So I kind of pinged Joe on the
side and talked to him a little bit
and
Really appreciate him taking the time to
put those features in and they made it
into the next release.
I had some conversations with a lot of
folks at WordCamp Canada.
One of the goals was I wanted to
try to sit down with some more developers
and get some feedback and demo my plug-in.
So I got a lot of great feedback
there.
I've since put in a long list of
issues of things I want to build it
on the plug-in.
One of my favorite ideas and it's
something I actually have started working
on already came from Ryan Welcher.
He had suggested what does the possibility
of
moving away from writing the checks and
the strings and all that in PHP,
what would that look like if I moved
it to the block.json?
And that would just remove one whole other
layer and then simplify the integration
for an external block.
So I thought that was a fantastic idea.
So now I'm trying to figure that out.
But that also means I need to wrap
my head around how translation works.
Mm-hmm.
And how does that work when you're pulling
a string from a block.json?
I've never had to handle that before.
So I'm actually quite excited for the
challenge and learning how that works.
And I'm going to need to find someone
that knows how to properly test it to
tell me if I did my job correctly
or not, though.
Yeah.
What kind of approaches are you using?
Or I guess maybe the first question is,
do you have sort of testing in place
as you're building out the plugin?
Or are you mostly just sort of testing
things manually as you go?
Right now,
it's all just manual because I want to
be able to get in there and see
how the experience is in the editor.
I mean,
I definitely do need to go in and
start adding some unit tests before things
start to grow a little bit too big.
But I don't think I'll ever get away
from the manual testing because to me,
the plugins also got to feel good for
the users.
And, you know,
there's no testing unit that's going to
tell me if that's a good experience or
not.
So...
Um,
there's always gonna be an aspect of the,
the human element has always gotta be here
cuz I, I, I do,
I'm a big proponent of making sure that
the UI is as clean and as, as,
as nice as it can be for the
end user.
Yeah.
What are your, uh, what was,
what would success sort of look like for,
for the block validation plugin in your
mind?
Like, what do you,
what are you hoping that this will sort
of achieve if, if you reach your goals?
I mean,
I have a couple of pretty lofty goals.
I mean, I think realistically, I mean,
more developers seeing this plugin and
looking at it as a viable solution in
their work in order to help validate
blocks or post-meta.
I would love to know that more people
are using it and it's working well for
them.
And then maybe we get some more
contributors that can help grow the
plugin.
I think that would be a best case
scenario.
I mean,
if I wanted to look at big picture,
I mean,
I keep seeing stuff like the abilities API
and the interactivity API crop up in
WordPress.
I really do truly think we need a
validations API.
And I think at some point I might
just take what I've done and throw it
up as a discussion and hope for the
best.
You know, that's my pie in the sky.
And, you know,
I don't know where it's going to go
until I put it out there in the
universe.
And I fully plan on doing that at
some point.
That's awesome.
Yeah, I agree.
I think it's really valuable just from a
user education standpoint.
I've played with it a little bit.
I probably haven't configured it to the
right degree because I really just sort of
threw it up on this site, actually,
just to get a sense of what it
does.
But even just from the perspective of
knowing when you're doing things wrong.
It seems like it should be...
Like you said,
it's super easy to not even realize that
you're creating inaccessible content.
And so just from an education standpoint,
I know because I've worked with... I mean,
I worked with Rianne Rietveld,
who's one of the...
biggest accessibility advocates in the
WordPress ecosystem and probably beyond
and like just is amazing to work alongside
and she has drilled several things into my
brain over the years of working with her
but like it's still like
Because it's so easy,
because there's so much variability,
and because the rules aren't super fixed,
like there's things where it's like, well,
in this case,
Images are a great example.
In this case,
you definitely need alt text,
but in this case,
the image is just decorative,
so it doesn't necessarily need alt text.
There's nuance,
and accessibility really requires a human
in the loop.
So just...
Having something that gives you feedback
that kind of suggests like, hey,
maybe you should be doing this thing is
super valuable.
And I do think that pulling that into
core is maybe a lofty goal,
but it shouldn't be super unrealistic.
Like,
I feel like it's a thing that could
be really valuable to anyone.
Thank you.
I like to think so.
Yeah.
So let us switch gears a little bit
too.
You mentioned before the recording that
you're a little bit of a RPG nerd.
Let's get into the nerdiness.
What sort of nerd things are you...
What are you nerding out on these days?
well i haven't jumped into games in quite
some time i mean the last year of
of life between building this validation
stuff and doing the word camp work has
consumed a lot of my time and then
you know everything else is all about the
family so um but now that word camp
is done and i'm stepping back a little
bit on like developing for five and six
hours every night after i you know develop
all the effort right
I'm jumping into Ghosts of Yotei was a
new game.
So I really enjoyed the last Ghosts of
Tsushima.
Now,
there's also a couple of RPGs that are
on my wish list.
I was reading about one the other day.
The name escapes me,
but I'm trying to catch up from the
last couple of years of gaming releases.
I also just grabbed a copy of Elder
Scrolls Online.
I'm quite interested in that one.
It also seems like something my wife might
enjoy.
She's also an RPG fan,
so looking for something that we might be
able to play together would be ideal,
especially for the winter.
Yeah.
What draws you into role-playing video
games specifically?
What was your introduction and what was
the thing that pulled you in and was
like, yeah, this is the thing for me?
Everything about the Final Fantasy series
is what drew me into games when I
was growing up.
I mean,
I got I got the Nintendo Entertainment
System and everybody was playing Mario and
Duck Hunt and I got Final Fantasy and
it was game over for me right from
that point.
There's just something about leveling and
building a character.
And then, of course,
as RPGs evolved over time.
being able to customize that character and
not being locked into what that game and
what that creator was trying to make this
character be.
So you kind of break inside of the
mold.
And I think you can relate it back
to a lot of the D&D stuff.
I didn't really play a lot of that
as a kid.
I did just maybe for a year or
so.
But just the idea that what you're
creating is unique to you.
You can do whatever you want to do
with it.
And I think that aspect of RPGs is
really appealing
to me just and the open world concept
and just being able to get lost in
those things for hours on end and I
mean I remember playing Skyrim and I think
the first month or so I played Skyrim
I played for like forty hours but I
accomplished nothing in the big picture
because it was all about exploring and you
know leveling and building the character
and like just fun stuff like that that
I like to get lost in
Yeah, I really enjoy...
The thing that I love the most about
role-playing,
whether it's video games or whether it's
tabletop role-playing games,
or even some tabletop board games even,
is the storytelling,
is getting lost in the story.
And I remember the first time...
I remember when I played Final Fantasy VII
back in the day,
Like, just, like, that, it blew me away,
like, the level of, like,
before that it felt like the story was
kind of like, you know, oh,
your princess is in another castle, and,
like, it was there, but, like,
it was a little bit, like, forced, but,
like,
Final Fantasy seven like chrono cross like
things like that were like the story is
really really immersive and deep and like
even like Kingdom Hearts the You know like
it it was really like elevating
video games to to an art form um
that that was really like on the same
level as like you know reading and reading
lord of the rings you know like except
that you are frodo you know
Yeah,
I remember times when like just my friends
and I would like, oh,
the new Final Fantasy is coming or here's
the launch trailer.
And we would like just totally geek out
over the animations of all the deities or
daikons or whatever they decided to call
them in those games.
And you'd see like Bahamut like rise up
and how great the graphics were like.
Those were like just I remember those
being super exciting moments to get to see
the improvements.
Because to me, I found RPGs.
had the biggest graphical improvement year
over year with what they were trying to
put out there with the stories and like
like you said with the story like you
also need to have those those really
strong visuals like you had to make it
look like you were watching a movie at
times and final fantasy in my opinion did
it leagues above everybody else to a
certain degree and it was just always
excited to see what they were going to
come up with next so i always have
a i'll always have a special place for
final fantasy in my gaming heart did you
ever
Do you ever get into those sort of
interactive movie-style games?
I'm thinking of things like
Phantasmagoria.
I think Wing Commander had one where it
was like...
Wing Commander is a great example because
they had Mark Hamill play one of the
characters.
So they have actual actors
But the game itself is almost like a
Myst-style point-and-click sort of thing,
but then with these live-action clips
interspersed depending on what you unlock
or what you find.
Did you ever get into those sorts of
things?
There's one that really stands out and I
absolutely love this game.
I like Sean Ashmore as an actor and
he did Quantum Break.
That game was fantastic on the Xbox.
So that had that sort of like you
play the game and then there'd be like
a movie clip and like you would you
would sit there was I think one part
that was like a twenty five minute clip.
I was watching an episode essentially.
Yeah, I really enjoyed that game like
It was a good break from something where
it's like action like nonstop versus this
game had a good action.
Then you could sit back and it felt
like something I wanted to have snacks.
I don't snack when I'm gaming,
but this was one of those ones where
I definitely had to have snacks because I
was essentially watching a movie and I
just got to play in between clips.
Right.
I remember thinking at the time that that
was the future of what games were going
to turn into.
They were going to be more cinematic,
and more cinematic from a production
value.
Honestly, that's not not true.
It's not that thing that I thought it
was at the time.
I was so adamant that that was where
gaming was going to that my senior year
in college, my plan was...
I didn't actually do this thing,
but my plan was that I would spend...
One semester, so I was, my final project,
my senior project was going to be like
one of those sort of point and click
kind of interactive movie sort of games.
And so the first semester we were going
to spend filming all the video stuff,
the second semester is me
figuring out how to turn that into a
game.
And I ultimately didn't do that second
part.
We did the movie.
I did an interactive CD-ROM instead.
But I was just convinced that that was
going to be the feature.
And of course, that's not...
Those games pretty much died off,
but they were replaced by things like,
I mean, you look at Baldur's Gate three,
which is one of the top grosses,
the most highly grossing games.
And I don't know how long ever, maybe,
I don't know.
But the budgets are definitely there.
There's professional voice actors doing
things, doing the voice acting.
In a lot of cases, there's mocap.
The actors are doing things that are being
recorded and the cut scenes and things are
a lot of times cinema quality.
And now the graphics are getting to the
point where it's pretty darn close.
If you compare that to even just film
CGI from ten years ago,
we're way beyond that in terms of what
you could just run on a PC.
Yeah, I think that it's...
Just where things have gone is really
interesting.
It does feel like things are moving or
have already moved to elevate video games
into something that is comparable to
filmmaking and novels.
It really is, to me, an art form.
Yeah, if I'm correct,
I think the video game industry is
actually bigger as far as like it's how
much it makes compared to the movie
industry and the music industry, too.
So it's it's probably one of the one
of the biggest grossing forms of
entertainment going right now.
Yeah.
It's pretty wild.
Yeah.
So Ghost of Yokai, I've heard about that.
Tell me about what is exciting about Ghost
of Yokai.
I know about it because I think there's
some critical role friends and voice
actors that are doing some of the stuff
in there.
So that's how I've heard of it.
Yeah,
now I haven't dove into the game yet.
I actually just installed it over the
weekend.
But I played the first version,
which was called Ghost of Tsushima.
And...
That game,
I think I put in about ninety hours
into that game.
Like it's just an unreal amount of time.
I just I loved it so much.
I think I finished it.
I could have probably finished it in about
forty, forty five hour mark.
But it was just there was something about
it.
I just enjoyed going to do all of
those extra cycles.
Like I find most games,
once you get to the end game,
it feels repetitive and you just don't
care anymore.
Yeah, no, this game I wanted more.
So I chose to not go and complete
the game because I just wanted to keep
exploring and
Kept going and somewhere around the ninety
minute ninety hour mark, I decided,
all right,
it's time to time to wrap this up
and move on.
It's been like six months, you know,
tons of other games.
But there's something about the samurai
genre and the way that game controlled and
the way it felt.
It just felt really good.
It was fun.
The combat system was great.
It had enough of an upgrade system to
keep my interest going.
So when I saw the next one get
announced, I immediately pre-ordered it.
And I looked at it and I said,
well,
that comes out right before WordCamp.
So I'll see you in November.
And here we are.
And I'm going to dive in.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much, Troy,
for coming on.
For anyone who's interested in learning
more about you or finding you online,
where can people find you?
I just actually rebooted my personal site
for the first time in a decade.
So I'm now going to be blogging at
troychaplin.ca.
You can also find me on post status
or make WordPress if you have any
questions or want to touch base or if
you want more information around the block
accessibility work I'm doing,
you can check out
blockaccessibilitychecks.com.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much it.
And the plugin is on WordPress.org.
So you can download it just in your
WordPress admin and install it and play
around with it.
Well, thanks again, Troy, for coming on.
Thank you,
everyone who is watching or listening to
this in the future.
And for everyone else,
we'll see you on the internet.
Awesome.
Thank you very much, Chris.
Yep.
Thank you.