Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: February 26, 2021

These are the weekly notes for 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 meeting that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.

Updates from working groups

• Documentation and Accessibility Patterns: updating the existing accessibility standards document. Publishing information about 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/. 2.1 changes. Plan is still to publish the document around the 5.7 release.
• Media: most 5.8 priorities set. Planning to scrub all old tickets. The most notable change is removing infinite scroll from the media library.
• Themes: no progress on workshop lesson plans. Two Accessibility Ready tagged themes went live.
• GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/: persistent list view continues to be a topic of discussion. Full site editing second call for testing. Internet Explorer 11 support could be ending. Post going live Monday or soon after.
• Design: no updates.
• MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.: no updates.
• General: Twenty-one tickets fixed in 5.7.

Call for WordPress 5.8 accessibility team’s goals

The post has been published and is ready for your feedback: Accessibility Team’s goals for WordPress 5.8 and beyond

Open floor

• The next Learn WordPress working group meeting is Thursday, March 4, 2021 at 3:00PM UTC.
• New contributors to the accessibility team would like to discuss in a future meeting how to get started with contributing.
• Testing welcome on a GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issue to fix some accessibility issues with the blocks list in navigation mode: New: output block position for screen readers. Update: refactor the way the screen reader information on block button is delivered.
• The Gutenberg PR Add NVDA instructions to the accessibility testing docs was merged in 3 days ago.