Accessibility Team Update: January 1, 2014

Happy New Year to the entire WordPress community!

Accessible IRC Clients

Thanks to the team members who joined us today, and to @grahamarmfield who reported in while traveling. Just as we got underway we had a question on Twitter asking which IRC clients are accessible plus we found out later that one of our team members, @arush was sidelined when her IRC client “totally choked.” So after the meeting we used the LazyWeb technique and asked @WPAccessibility followers for some suggestions:

  • For Windows, Jennifer Sutton @jsutt suggests Instantbird
  • For Mac, @jsutt also recommends Adium
  • For Unix, Chris Nestrud @IAmChrisN recommends irssi

Much thanks to Jennifer, who is a big help 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 and to the entire accessibility community, and also thanks to Chris Nestrud for the Unix suggestion. Chris says: “anything with a text 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. on Unix should work. I like irssi.” We can still use suggestions for accessible IRC clients for iOSiOS The operating system used on iPhones and iPads., Android, and Windows Mobile.

Workflow

We are starting the process of auditing 3.8 for keyboard accessibility. Reports are generated in the process of accessibility auditing. We discussed how to handle those reports. A few meetings ago @ceo suggested that we create the reports in RTF format so the formatting is not lost in the platform shuffle and we will do that.

During today’s meeting we finalized plans to create a public 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/ repository where we will store the finished reports and other documents as we produce them. We will also create and update our assignments and to-do lists on Github.

We also finalized plans to create a Dropbox account for the team which we will use to store documents to be reviewed before they are finalized. Tom Harrigan made the suggestion that we set up a directory in Dropbox that will automatically sync from dropbox to github.

@davidakennedy has agreed to set up Github and Dropbox. Thanks David!

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-updates