Accessibility Team Update: April 16, 2014

About Us

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 shares accessibility expertise across the project to improve the accessibility of WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and resources.

WordPress targets WCAG 2.1 at level AA as the standard for development.

Learn More

For support related to WordPress & accessibility, visit the WordPress Accessibility forum.

You can also ask questions during Accessibility Team Office Hours every Wednesday at 14:00 UTC in the accessibility channel in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

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.