Wick Editor is Bringing Animation and Game Dev to More Creators with our $70,000 Mozilla Award
The Wick Editor is wrapping up our Mozilla Open Source Support Award! Our community is growing, users are finding new and exciting ways to create projects, and we’ve just released our newest versions on desktop, mobile and tablet to compliment our web editor!
What is the Wick Editor?
The Wick Editor is a free and open source tool for creating animations, games and everything in-between. It lives entirely in the browser at www.wickeditor.com, making it available on any computer with an internet connection. We have aimed to make the tool a user-friendly experience for beginners and intermediate creators everywhere who might not otherwise have access to other multimedia tools!
We’ve been developing Wick Editor since 2016. Since then, nearly 500,000 people have used the project. With Mozilla’s help, we’ll be able to bring our tool to even more creators!
Improving Access
With more and more people now needing to work and learn from home, creating accessible ways for people with any device to create with Wick Editor has been an incredibly important goal. That’s why the first parts of our Award focused on “Access” and expanding the Wick Editor’s reach to new devices. Over 20 Million people in the U.S. alone don’t have access to broadband internet with even more households being dependent on smartphones.
Converting the Editor to a mobile experience was no small task. With the help of our designer Alex, and intern Nick, we scoped out every screen and modal in the editor and started to consider how this redesign might go! We reviewed and created hundreds of screen designs to find the right ones!
Improving Accessibility
Access wasn’t the only concern throughout this redesign. Improving the Accessibility of the editor was our other major goal for this Award. We combed through the editor looking to improve our accessibility standards to be in line with WCAG, a set of guidelines designed to improve the accessibility of content on the web. This resulted in dozens of improvements throughout the editor, from new contrast standards, new new labeling of inputs, to new font and icon sizes.
In addition to improvements throughout the editor, we improved the accessibility of the main Wick Editor site! We updated the mobile layout and the interactions of our learn page to make it much easier for students and beginners to access learning content!
What’s Next for the Wick Editor?
Overall, these improvements have been incredibly successful. The Wick Editor now serves over 40,000 creators every month, and we know these improvements have helped even more beginners improve their creative skills.
Huge thanks to the Mozilla Open Source Support Program for their gracious support of our Access and Accessibility Improvements.
If you want to keep following along with our next set of improvements, you can do so by joining our community forum at forum.wickeditor.com. If you’re interested in supporting our development, head on over to patreon.com/WickEditor or our GitHub Sponsors page.
