IRC Meeting: 6 Feb 2013

Thanks to everyone who managed to make the IRC meeting on #wordpress-ui yesterday.  We had a very productive discussion and — despite the entertainment provided by way of my terrible iPad typing — took the first steps towards organising the group along more formal lines.

@GrahamArmfield will be looking after TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.. Time permitting, he will be monitoring the existing 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)-tagged tickets and taking the lead on the submission of new Trac tickets to cover issues such as the problems within the current custom menus admin area. So if you are thinking of raising a new Trac ticket, can you raise the subject here first? That way, we should avoid unnecessary replication.

@joedolson expressed a vested interest in the editorial flow area but, for the time being, will be concentrating on front-end accessibility via the proposed theme accessibility audit and an extension to the current theme submission checks.

@AccessibleJoe will take the lead on user testing videos so that we can build up a library of video resources to support coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. developers.

@esmi will continue to take lead on documentation (liaising with @Siobhan and @DrewAPicture) as well as working with @lessbloat and other members of the 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. team to try to develop in-house user accessibility testing.

We are, however, still stretched pretty thin. So if you would like to get involved, we would love to hear from you. Those of you with the skills to create patches will be particularly welcomed by the UI Team who are currently overhauling the Custom Menus and Post Revision areas.

#wordpress-ui log for February 6 2013

#group, #irc, #meetup, #testing, #video

User Videos – An Accessibility Angle

Over the last few months WP dev lessbloat has done a series of videos where he has invited in ‘real-life’ users to try out various features of the WordPress backend – and has videoed the experience.

I’ve watched many of these videos and read the transcripts of the interactions and they are a really great insight into usability, and assumptions that developers make about how much users understand about what’s expected of them. The most recent one is at: https://make.wordpress.org/ui/2013/01/09/two-more-menus-user-tests-focusing-on-this/

I’ve often thought that it would be quite revealing if somehow we could produce a series of videos of blind and motor impaired users trying out key bits of the admin area. These would highlight 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) issues perhaps more than words on a page could, and could constitute a powerful benchmark on which to base future improvements.

Does anyone else think this might be useful? And if so, how could we go about making some?

#testing, #usability, #video