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Innovation is at the heart of the WordPress VIP community. 

With the power of open source, our community is pushing the boundaries of the web to address real-world challenges and build a better web. We believe ‌innovations are meant to be shared and that we can all learn from each other.

During our recent virtual event, Run the Web: Community Innovation Showcase, presenters from the Ford Foundation, Al Jazeera, and 10up highlighted new plugins that can help WordPress leverage AI to scale high-quality content creation, streamline developer processes, and improve video accessibility.

Video accessibility: improving experiences everywhere

Video content can be highly engaging, but it can also be difficult for those with disabilities to fully access‌. Simply providing basic captions isn’t enough to make a video truly accessible. 

As part of their mission to end inequality in all its forms and to advance inclusion and accessibility, the Ford Foundation created a new WordPress plugin that makes video content accessible to audiences who may be blind, visually impaired, deaf, or hard-of-hearing. 

Head of Product and Digital Engagement Bedirhan Cinar demonstrated how the plugin provides a scrollable transcription next to a video embed, with the ability to download the transcript as a PDF. It also provides the option to toggle between audio-described and non-audio-described versions of videos, the former narrating the key visual elements as the video plays. 

Importantly, the plugin allows users to toggle between the two versions of the video on the same page, allowing publishers to provide accessible videos without causing user confusion or harming SEO. 

ClassifAI: supercharge content workflows and engagement

Any content publisher knows that writing great content is only part of successful content marketing. 

Successful content must be accompanied by compelling images, excerpts for search engines, tags and alt-text for accessibility, and links to additional opportunities to engage. ClassifAI, created by 10up, can streamline many of these manual tasks to help your content get to market faster.

Jeffrey Paul, Director of Open Source at 10up, demonstrated how the tool integrates with OpenAI, Microsoft Azure AI, and IBM Watson to generate images based on text prompts, and automatically generate excerpts, titles, and tags to ensure accessibility and findability of your content. It can also find the most relevant and impactful content for your readers to visit next based on your site’s traffic data.

The plugin’s goal is to free writers from tedious but necessary tasks, enabling them to write more high-quality content.

Cortex: simplify and accelerate AI-powered application development

For developers and content teams, Cortex acts as a digital co-pilot that streamlines many coding tasks, and enables developers with minimal AI knowledge to use generative models in their applications. 

Anes Mostefaoui, Tech Lead at Al Jazeera, shared how the organization uses Cortex across media, editorial, and developer teams to publish efficiently.

For developers, this JavaScript framework offers a way to build intelligent applications, even for those without AI expertise. It allows creation of shared pathways that can be resolved directly through Graph or API, leveraging out-of-the-box or custom models, all without engineering effort. This allows the Al Jazeera team to quickly build and implement features that non-technical teams can use to improve manual production tasks.

For example, Cortex expedites media management processes by adding video transcripts, automatically adding tags, and generating summaries. It also helps editorial teams by suggesting headlines, detecting keywords, and extracting highlights across multiple languages. This improves content accessibility while also maximizing reach and engagement at scale. 

Continuing innovation

The WordPress VIP ecosystem is constantly innovating, providing valuable opportunities for customers and partners to learn from each other. 

As Steph Yiu, WordPress VIP’s Chief Customer Officer, noted during the summit, “One of the things I love about this community is that you can see how so many of our customers are solving problems. The magic happens when we bring a bunch of smart enterprise developers together to share and be inspired.”

Want to become part of this exciting community? Schedule a demo with one of our experts today.