Author Archives: Joseph Karr O'Connor

Joseph Karr O'Connor 7:23 pm on November 16, 2015
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Accessibility Team Chat Summary November 16, 2015

Documentation

Discussion of adding information about accessible content management to either the Codex or 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) Handbook. Decided to add it to Handbook. Keyboard shortcuts will go in the Codex with a link from the Handbook.

Tickets

#34681 Consider removing the “Disable the visual editor when writing” option.
Decided to gather user experience data. Four questions to ask:

      Do you know how to switch between the visual and HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. editor in WordPress?
      If no, please try and figure out how, and tell us how that experience was for you.
      If yes, give us your thoughts about your experience using that feature.
      Do you use the option “Disable the visual editor when writing” in your profile?

#34625: wp-login.php site title link points to wordpress.org.
Suggested fix: removing the title attribute, changing the text to ‘Powered by WordPress’, and leaving the filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. on that text.

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

Joseph Karr O'Connor 8:17 pm on August 31, 2015
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Team Chat Summary August 31, 2015

Headings

More work is being done on headings in admin. Jeffrey de Wit created some tickets some of which are already patched and committed. Follow the headings discussion in #accessibility on 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/..

Handbook

Devised a strategy for building out the Make WordPress Accessible Handbook. Page leaders will help others build out the handbook.

Twenty Sixteen

Twenty Sixteen is on Github. Twenty Sixteen is also available in the theme directory. It’s not in trunk yet. According to David Kennedy ” I did a 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)-ready review before it went on 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/ and the directory to make sure nothing was way off accessibility-wise. It’s solid. Takashi knows the drill.” We will ask the testers to test it. David Kennedy did an #accessibility-ready audit of Twenty Sixteen.

Select2

We continued a discussion about Select2 as an alternative to the autocomplete/tagging input field types. There are two main accessibility issues: it doesn’t do a good job of providing feedback to screen readers and it requires the ‘enter’ key to begin typing for autocomplete, a non-standard interaction. The testers have tested Select2 and it is not very accessible. Rian Rietveld will collect all the data and report next week.

WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US

Several of us are submitting proposals for talks at WordCamp US and depending on funding assistance some of us will be attending. Today is the last day for submitting proposals.

#accessibility-team-meeting, #team-reps

Joseph Karr O'Connor 5:07 am on August 13, 2015
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Team Chat Summary August 10, 2015

New Structure Proposed

Rian Rietveld wrote a proposal on how to structure our work better and plan ahead longer and we discussed it. What follows is examples from the proposal.

Goals and Issues

This will be a separate page on make/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) and also a main menu item. It gives an overview of our goals for the accessibility of WordPress, the work we (want to) do, how this is organized, how we test, a roadmap for the next year and how we track the progress of issues we are working on. An example of the roadmap for release 4.4:

Release 4.4 (December 2015, Scott Taylor)
  • Finish still open issues focus from 4.3
  • Semantic heading structure Admin
  • The 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.
  • Handbook
  • Twenty Sixteen (?)

Central Ideas

Some central ideas also included in the proposal are keyboard focus, work on the handbook, color contrast, system to better follow tickets including splitting up tickets among team members on which to concentrate, and continue to develop code pattern library. Much more is included in the proposal and for now we will continue to work on the proposal to make it a more formal document to cover our activities over the next year.

We also talked about the fact that having a planning document to refer to does not obviate the need to address all new features since there is a tight turn around towards the end of a cycle because that’s when the features going into the release are announced. If we don’t follow all new features we might miss one or more that advance to release at the very end.

#accessibility-team-meeting, #team-reps

Joseph Karr O'Connor 8:47 am on July 8, 2015
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Accessibility Team Meeting July 6, 2015

H1 in the admin

For 4.3 there will be an H1 in the admin. #31650: Missing H1 heading in the admin. Assistive technologyAssistive technology Assistive technology is an umbrella term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities and also includes the process used in selecting, locating, and using them. Assistive technology promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to, or changing methods of interacting with, the technology needed to accomplish such tasks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_technology users look for the H1 for way finding. Though there is the page title, when AT separates out elements such as links, lists, and headings, the info needs to be there too. Two weeks ago we ran this by Mika Epstein @Ipstenu and she helped us understand heading levels and plugins. Mika spot checked some plugins and it showed that they are using H2 and her opinion is that “we can post about that in make/plugins to try and spread the word.” Thanks Mika. More work will be done on the rest of the hierarchy.

Main Open Tickets

We also briefly discussed:

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-meetings

Joseph Karr O'Connor 2:39 am on May 2, 2015  

Accessibility Team Update: May 1, 2015

Weekly Meeting Change

This week during the Wednesday meeting we decided that the Monday testing meeting is now where the action is so we decided to stop having the Wednesday meeting. On Monday, May 4, we will all meet 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/. at 18:00 UTC. We are also using Slack throughout the week to work on tickets and patches, ask questions, and discuss anything that comes up. First register for the WordPress forums and then follow the steps on the WordPress chat instruction page to get set up. Then find your way to #accessibility. See you there!

Joseph Karr O'Connor 8:24 am on February 16, 2015
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Accessibility Team Update: February 11, 2015

Testing

We had a report by Rian Rietveld on testing results. Things are going very well. Rian said: “I’m getting test results back on the tab order of the post table, it seems to work ok, but they found a ton of other problems, I have to check the current tickets and open new if necessary.”

Pattern Library

David Kennedy told us that the repos are set up for contributions to the theme pattern library. See the Accessible Theme Pattern Library Update for February for more info.

CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Discussion

Andrea Fercia reported on a discussion he had with the Core team. He asked about menu bar admin focus and non-link links (28599 and 26504). Joe Dolson said “the link/button question really requires specific cases; I’m not sure how we could approach giving any kind of global comments on the topic.” Andrea said that he also updated the Core team about the first testing round on customizer theme switcher.

Theme Checking

Joe Dolson updated us on the state of checking themes requesting the accessible-ready tag.”We’re now up to 29 live themes carrying 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)-ready tag which have been tested and passed. There’s one outstanding theme live that does not pass (_tk); it’s undergoing the review process now, and will either be suspended or updated soon.I’ve got two pending theme reviews to do, and know of at least 1 theme that’s currently approved and waiting to go live.”
Joe has also trained two of the theme review team admins on reviewing for accessibility. Additionally Joe has shifted support for landmark roles into a required feature for accessibility-ready themes, rather than recommended.

Landmarks

Discussion turned to the over-abundance of landmarks. The current proposed code (#23089) outputs too many landmark roles. A theme may add numerous landmark roles without the ability to control where and how many there are. Andrea noted “currently, _s outputs one aside (mapped to complementary) for each widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user., nested inside a general complementary area for widgets.” Jared Smith of WebAim recently said “Easy accessibility check: Search for “role” in source code. If 0 instances, probably bad. If 1-20, probably OK. If greater than 20, definitely awful.”

Other Items

Morten Rand-Hendriksen asked: “What is the best tool for computer voice control (in particular, voice controlled browsing) on both Windows and MacOS? Are there any workable free tools or are we confined to things like Dragon?” There is a demo mode in JAWS and NVDA is free. If there is a free way for developers and designers to experience things using voice control it will help them understand the issues better.Sam Sidler noted that “OS X has voice control built-in, so I’d call that free, but not open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL.-level free.”

We finished off by discussing Shiny Updates (see ticket 29820 now landed in core). According to Andrea Fercia there are two main accessibility issues:

    • focus handling
    • absolutely no feedback for screen reader users when an install/update action starts, ends, fails, etc.

About the latter issue Andrea said “I’d like to propose a solution based on Graham Armfield’s idea (see #28892) but done in a way that it would hopefully be a useful tool for developers.”

The entire conversation from February 11 is available 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/. archives for the #accessibility channel.

#accessibility-team-meeting, #team-reps

Joseph Karr O'Connor 6:11 am on August 30, 2014
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Accessibility Team Update: August 27, 2014

Weekly Testing Meeting

For the last two weeks we’ve been trying something new, a weekly 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) testing meeting, 17:00 – 19:30 UTC. We meet in the wordpress-ui IRC channel to share our tests. If you want to join in or just see what we are doing just show up in the IRC channel. Read the logs for August 18 and August 25 to get an idea of what we are doing.

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

Joseph Karr O'Connor 6:07 pm on July 11, 2014  

Accessibility Team Update: July 9, 2014

WordPress 4.0 BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1

In our meeting this week, Sam Sidler gave us the heads-up that 4.0 Beta 1 was about to be released and told us that it is “incredibly important that you test it and all of its new features.” In her post WordPress 4.0 Beta 1, Helen Hou-Sandi announces the release and talks about new features.

Testing

This Saturday, July 12, some of us will be testing 4.0 Beta 1 for 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) and other issues. If you want to get involved the start time is 15:00 UTC. Log in to the #wordpress-ui IRC channel. Also refer back to and update the Make WordPress Accessible page for information about what has been tested and what needs to be tested.

Test Environment

Remember, we’re testing 4.0 Beta 1 so you’ll need an installation of WordPress with the WordPress Beta Tester 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 set to download and install “bleeding edge nightlies.” You don’t want to do this on your live site, so use a tool like DesktopServer by ServerPress to create a virtual server on your desktop computer.

Joseph Karr O'Connor 6:29 am on June 20, 2014  

Accessibility Team Update: June 18, 2014

Visual Focus In Left Navigation

Screenshot of admin left navigation showing Posts menu selected with New Post submenu selected

Posts menu selected with indistinguishable darker black shading, Add New sub menu item selected with text in dark blue. Note that dark blue text against dark gray is hard to see.

Color Alone

Visual focus indicators for wayfinding are relied on heavily by some keyboard-only users. @helen notes the enhanced visual focus indicators now in trunk. Ticket #28267 needs a lot more work bringing the focus style to various places but one area that needs a smart solution is left navigation. Now we are relying on color changes which are, in some instances, too subtle. Indeed, color is not to be used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.

Suggestions

We discussed this for most of the meeting and here are some suggestions.

  • Helen reports that a blue glow does not look good
  • White outline around menu item with white outline also around selected submenu item
  • Reversing the colors with another undefined indicator element
  • Triangle to the left of main menu item and selected submenu item
  • Underline under main menu item and selected submenu item (might be mistaken for links)

Solution Needed

We need some suggestions for an elegant solution. Bear in mind that there are eight admin color schemes and any solution should take that into account. I have created ticket #28599 to work on this issue. A WordPress 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 shirt to the person who comes up with the adopted solution!

Joseph Karr O'Connor 4:04 am on June 12, 2014  

Accessibility Team Update: June 11, 2014

New Accessible Theme

Joe Dolson is working on a new accessible theme for the Cities series using an innovative modular approach for 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) by gathering up accessibility concepts into separate files.

Joe says:

“I’m explicitly placing all the accessibility-specific code into a11y.php and a11y.js, to make them easy to find. This is intended to be a useful resource for theme developers, so I want everything to be easy to find.”

Also of note is skiplinks.js which fixes a bug in WebKit. Simply using an anchor link for the skiplink isn’t enough for WebKit, because keyboard focus will not follow visual focus without JavascriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/.. Joe will be presenting this new theme in a session at WordCamp Chicago this weekend.

Accessibility Theme Check Process Enhanced

We are aware that a few themes that are not accessible have arrived in the theme directory with the #accessibility-ready tag. Perhaps the theme creators misunderstood the tag or copied it from another theme without thinking. We got a message from someone who knows accessibility that he bought a theme based on the fact that the free version has the #accessibility-ready tag. Expecting it to be accessible, he was disappointed. Contacting the theme creator he found out that they will be uploading a new free version without the tag.

Joe Dolson on the process:

“We’re still struggling with themes getting through the process without getting audited, but we have a recourse for this now. The official policy is to give the author notification that their theme needs to go through the accessibility-ready review to keep the tag, and that they have 72 hours to begin rectification – either by uploading a new version without the tag or by uploading a new version that will begin the process of meeting the accessibility-ready requirements. After 72 hours without a response, the theme will be suspended from the theme repository.”

Unification of Visual Focus Indication

It is essential to provide a visual cue to sighted keyboard-only users letting them know where they are on the page. There is no standard look for visual focus indicators. The issue is made more complex because user agents approach this in different ways. @helen talked with us last week and this week again about the fact that the visual look of focus indicators is not unified, and in some instances is not perceivable. For example, on the Media Library screen this is a screenshot showing “apply” button with dotted line focus indicator active and it is not perceivable. One tab press to the right of the “apply” button is the “All dates” select menu selected with a screenshot showing “All dates” select menu with blue glow and dotted line.

The base look might be the approach taken by WebKit, a blue glow. A base look with more than one element is what we seek. Even if the color blue cannot be perceived there is still the glow. This week we have a goal of organizing the approach to 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. in such a way that the visual focus indicators are unified and perceivable.