Twenty Eleven Accessible child theme error

Rian’s accessibility theme for Twenty Eleven is a child theme; does the site in question have the original Twenty Eleven theme installed? Using a child theme requires that the parent theme be present in order to work.

Hi Joe. Thanks for replying.

To be sure, I had Twenty Eleven there but just deleted and reinstalled it anew.

Because I am experimenting with this stuff, I also have tried a combination of Twenty Ten Five (html5) and a child, Twenty Ten Five Accessible, which I guess relate in the same way.

Everything is wonky on this site. Either it’s gonna be major surgery or replacement and manual copying and reposting just to be certain any of us managing it now would be fully aware of what is installed and how things are done. But since I am a volunteer with limited permission to do things and new at the requirements of accessibility, I can’t just do it my way.

I just did a secondary, parallel installation of WP in a dev folder. Installed the Twenty Eleven and the Accessible Child too. Same error, out of the box with no other complicating settings or data.

??

Looking at the files at the github repository, I think your solution is to delete the function.php file from the child theme. It shouldn’t be in the child theme, because the way child themes work is to load the child theme files instead of the original theme when they’re present — because the functions.php file is present, it’s being loaded, but doesn’t include any of the theme’s custom functions.

I also note that the theme isn’t set up with a parent theme reference; it’s just got standard theme info, so I think that you’ll also need to edit the stylesheet to make it a legitimate child theme.

It needs the line ‘Template: twenty-eleven’ in the stylesheet header.

Hmm… I did both. The stylesheet editor accepted the adjustment. I ditched the functions.php. Still no change.

Doesn’t look like it did any harm though.

Hmmm. I think actually the twenty-eleven slug is ‘twentyeleven’ — the slug should be the directory that the theme is in.

I did notice that and made the shift prior to the last post. Still not working right. Same error notice.

I even tried the same changes at my new installation, with none of the old ghosts lingering. Still no luck.

Could we be barking up the wrong tree?

Well, if everything is set up right – both themes uploaded appropriately, the child theme active as the live theme, etc., then even if you were still getting an error, I would expect it to have changed: the error you’re getting is pretty clear: the function being called in the child theme doesn’t exist.

That function is defined in the original theme’s ‘functions.php’ file, so what seems to be happening is that the child theme isn’t acting as a child theme — it’s not pulling in the parent theme’s code.

Hey – I was just reading the Child Theme info page: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Child_Themes

I noticed a note that says that you need to switch to a different theme and back to the child theme if you change the ‘Template’ line in the child theme header — try that. Presumably means that it only parses the header of the theme to identify it as a child on activation.

DUDE!!!

That’s it. (I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t imagining stuff.)

Or rather, a combination of the bunch of things you brought up:

• Blast the child theme’s functions.php
• Fix the child theme’s missing template name
• Load an unrelated theme and then return to the desired one

I managed to get it to work on the newly created dev site which will lurk in the background for some time still, but it’s nice to know some of these damned demons have been sent away.

I’ve seen that codex page you linked to but as I said, I’m sort of out of the WP loop and it’s hard to know what to prioritize when looking at all these things at once.

Thanks so much.

@ed, thanks for trying out the child theme
@joe, Thanks so much for answering and debugging

This child theme was a rough attempt to make some accessibility improvements, didn’t have a clue that someone would actually use it.
I will make the proper adjustments on the theme at the github.
Kind regards,
Rian

A new version of the Child theme has been added to the github:
https://github.com/RRWD/accessible-twenty-eleven-theme

It should work out of the box now.

Note: it’s not a fully WCAG 2 accessible child theme. I just made some adjustments.
The accessibility work I do next to my job, in my free time. Still trying to get some funding for time to do a decent study on this subject.

If you find more bugs, please let me know.

It is clear that function twentyeleven_content_nav() is not accessible.Look at the functions.php file. There you will find some clue. Function.php in child theme works in parallel to function.php in parent theme.So Check this function belong to which theme parent or child then locate the function and check for errors.