In this year-in-review episode of The GitHub Podcast, Cassidy and Abby are joined by Helen Hou-Sandí, GitHub’s engineering manager for the Accessibility Engineering team and lead developer in the WordPress project.
They dig into Maintainer Tiny Wins, a series of two week long timeboxed improvements that save millions of developer minutes a day, from smarter PR reviewers panels and one-click merge conflict resolution to long-awaited WebP support. Helen shares how accessibility issues often spark broader UX improvements, and why fixing “just” a border color can evolve into deeply impactful changes at GitHub’s scale. They also explore the rise of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as an open standard, GitHub’s new open source accessibility scanner action, supporting non-code contributors and AI as the “over-eager new contributor.
Whether you’re a maintainer, a contributor, or just love a good Furby-powered keynote, this episode is a love letter to the tiny details that make open source better for everyone.
Links mentioned in the episode:
GitHub Accessibility Scanner Action
Project Bluefin
GitHub Universe 2025 – Day Two Keynote
Unlocking the Power of MCP
2025 Octoverse Report
Refined GitHub Browser Extension
Git History Cleaner
Open Source Accessibility Summit
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