Authoring Tool AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Guidelines Testing

Jeanne Spellman (http://www.w3.org/People/jeanne/), W3C, joined us for the meeting to discuss the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) testing we will be doing on trunk starting May 12. ATAG testing is, in part, useful for guiding development of accessible “software for generating websites, for example, content management systems (CMS).”

ATAG Overview

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) Overview explains how ATAG testing will:

• help make authoring tools themselves accessible, so that people with disabilities can create web content, and
• help authors create more accessible web content — specifically: enable, support, and promote the production of content that conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/.).

ATAG Testing Harness

The W3CW3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.https://www.w3.org/. is developing an automated way to deliver ATAG test instructions and test result tracking and reports. It will also display WCAG test instructions and techniques, where applicable. In the the overall test instructions doc that was used when developing the tests there are general instructions at the top, followed by a table with the ATAG success criteria, and the test(s) for each one. As we are testing to WCAG level AA so will we be testing to ATAG level AA.

Process

Jeanne has about 15 volunteer testers. Thank you Jeanne! She explained the process: “We set up a page of accessible content, and a page of inaccessible content. Then we have a page of different types of content – video, audio, tables. Some of the ATAG tests check to see if WordPress breaks accessible content, while others see if WordPress fixes inaccessible content.” We discussed access to a test instance of WordPress trunk which is ready to go thanks to Rian Rietveld. There is no estimate as to how long the testing will take since it is a new process.

Helping WordPress and the W3C

This process will help improve WordPress and it will also help make ATAG 2.0 a finalized W3C standard. We are testing to WCAG level AA so we will be testing to ATAG level AA which will help the W3C process. Jeanne explained: “The writing is all done, and now we just need to prove to W3C management that there are 2 real world examples of every success criteria and 5 authoring tools have implemented ATAG level A.  AA is a huge bonus.”

Accounts and TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.

We noted that the volunteer testers will all need WordPress accounts. Aaron Jorbin very thoughtfully posted the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. handbook link to working with trac and opening a ticket. Joe Dolson noted that: “It (testing) doesn’t have to be finished to be able to create tickets – we should be ticketing every discovery as we move forward.” The W3C team will be able to pull reports of all the errors from the testing harness tool which should facilitate the process.

Team Member Thanks

Thanks all the other teams who participated in making WordPress 3.9 happen and who reached out to the accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) team for assistance. Many more people are asking us to check things than ever before. Special thanks to accessibility team members David A. Kennedy, Graham Armfield, and Joe Dolson who are mentioned in the 3.9 credits.

Weekly Meeting Time

There’s always confusion when the time changes and I regret that I compounded the confusion by being confused myself. I’m now using StatusClock.app by Pulsely for OS X set to GMT/UTC so I’ll be sure to call the weekly meeting to order at 19:00 UTC.

Previous Test

When the accessibility team did the last round of testing it was intended that it be done over a short period of time, but due to various factors it spread out over two months. That was a keyboard-only test because we were certain that, given our resources, we could not finish a full test. It turns out we could not finish even the attenuated test in a reasonable amount of time. This was not the intended outcome but I learned that we need many more testers to perform the testing in an effective manner. This is why I was very glad to make a testing plan with Jeanne Spellman of the W3CW3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.https://www.w3.org/. when we were at the International Technology and Persons With Disabilities Conference a month ago.

New Test Round

Jeanne Spellman of the W3C, the team contact for the User Agent Working Group and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AUWG), has committed to helping us test WordPress trunk using the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). Jeanne has assembled a good number of volunteers to do the testing and they will file tickets or bump things up to me as soon as they have identified an issue. This time I feel confident that with current team members providing guidance the W3C team will be able to accomplish the task in a short enough period of time to be most effective. Testing is now scheduled to start the week of May 12, 2014.

ATAG

For those not familiar with ATAG, it is primarily for developers of authoring tools including software for generating websites such as content management systems. There are two areas of focus: making sure that the authoring tool user interface is accessible, and that the authoring tool supports the production of accessible content. Just as with WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/. 2.0, ATAG has three levels of success criteria in order of increasing compliance: A, AA, and AAA. We are testing to WCAG 2.0 level AA so it follows that the ATAG testing will also be done to level AA. ATAG testing will help us discover the issues we need to address next. ATAG at a Glance provides a short summary of the accessibility principles and guidelines in ATAG 2.0.