Accessibility code standards for WordPress in draft

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) code standards for WordPress have been added to the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. handbook and are open for feedback over the next two week. Also see the Core blog announcement and the draft standards themselves!

#core-2, #development, #standards

Next IRC Meetup

Just a quick reminder that the next IRC meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. will be on Wednesday, 26 June at 19:00 UTC in #wordpress-iu.

Everyone welcome!

If you have never attended an WordPress IRC meetup before, you can find all of the details you will need to join in the Codex’s IRC page.

One topic for discussion is likely to be the development of a proposed 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) statement for WordPress. To whet your appetite and give you an idea of what we could aim for longer term, have a look at Drupal’s accessibility statement.

#core-2, #development, #meetup

WordPress Accessibility Trac Tickets Update – 13 Feb 2013

This is a useful link that returns all the accessibility-related trac tickets.

Existing TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. Tickets (Bugs) that aren’t Fixed.

12825 – Text resizing in Firefox – Raised 3 years ago(!) this one talks about the fact that WP admin screens don’t always look very clever when text is resized by user. Whilst most areas are OK, the buttons and toolbar at the top of the page are fixed-height and so text-spillage occurs. I don’t think everyone realises that zooming and resizing text are not the same thing and suit different people.

20294 – User password field missing label – Looks like some work was done for 3.5 but it appears it was never implemented.

21289 – Custom Menu builder – Raised last year but turned out to be duplicate of 14045 and linked to 22485. Ticket 23119 (see also below) is covering the rework of Custom Menus and design is still being debated hotly. Need to keep eye on this one as Custom Menu Builder has never been accessible since first introduced.

21334AccessibilityAccessibility 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) of Quick Edit Panel – Raised last summer, and is getting some attention now. Have suggested (amongst other things) that quick edit panel might be always visible as a result of switch in Screen Options, but kind of nervous about that. Could do with some further accessibility input (ie not just mine). The issue about whether certain links should be permanently visible coming in here as well – cf Skip links at top of page.

22104 – High contrast admin colour scheme – Raised in the autumn, and some debate ensued. However nothing really happened about this. Do we want to get behind this? Is there one high-vis theme that would work for all?

22606 – Keyboard issues selecting a background image in Theme CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. – Seems there is a fix for this, but need to test.

22682 – More keyboard issues with Theme Customizer after page refresh – Some action but has been downgraded in importance just before Christmas.

22933 and 23195 – Keyboard tab order in edit screens – Fix is now available that makes tabbing more consistent allegedly. But I haven’t been able to test this.

Trac tickets covering UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. work

23119UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. improvements to nav-menus.php – A LONG ticket with much debate. Difficult to work out exactly what is being proposed for accessibility here. One ticket proposed that accessibility option like widgets should be included – and apparently the stubs for that code are actually in the menu builder and may be used if js not available. Cyndy pointed out within ticket that drag and drop, and even using arrow keys to move items is not really any good for blind people. But would that be an option if there was sufficient announcing (using ARIA live regions?) to allow context to be voiced? And is it OK to just use the arrow keys for this – when users might expect something different to happen? And what about users on tablets using AT like VoiceOver?

New tickets required?

Add Media Functionality – don’t believe this is keyboard accessible (inc screen readers), nor easily accessible by speech recognition software either. But haven’t had chance to test yet.

#core-2, #development, #media-manager, #menus

Just published a new page of Useful Tools…

Just published a new page of Useful Tools. If you know of any plugins or development tools that can help to raise 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) of a site, theme or pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party, please let us know.

#development, #plugin, #tools