Enrique Sánchez 1:25 am on April 4, 2020
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Accessibility Team meeting notes – April 3, 2020

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.

Help testing the WordPress Auto-updates Feature PluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins.

@audrasjb and @pbiron asked the team for help testing the Auto-updates Feature plugin. This is a 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 that aims to provide automatic updates for plugins and themes feature as an opt-in feature.

You can find more information about the plugin on the plugin’s page and report any issues you come across to the plugin’s GitHub repository.

Statement on the use of Crowdcast for WP community events

We discussed the Community team’s consideration to use the Crowdcast streaming platform for online events. Knowing how inaccessible Crowdcast is, the Accessibility team wants to help the Community team find better alternatives. @joedolson wrote this post with recommendations for alternative setups and suggestions to make online events more accessible.

Open Floor

Team meeting time change due to DST

@ryokuhi reminded the team that we haven’t made a decision about moving our meeting time to adjust to DST. This is a change we’ve done in the past, and that other teams have done as well.

The consensus from team members present was that it was OK to move the meeting time, but we’d like to give folks who could not attend the chance to have their say.

Please let us know in the comments of this post if you are in favor of or against moving the meeting time an hour earlier to adapt to DST.

We will be making a final decision during our meeting next week.

+make.wordpress.org/core/

#meeting-notes

Joe Dolson 7:28 pm on April 3, 2020  

Accessibility & Online Streaming

It came to our attention recently that the Community Team selected Crowdcast to handle video streaming for the online adaptation of 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. events. Crowdcast has significant 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) limitations, and cannot be recommended for events that wish to embrace an audience of diverse abilities.

Presenting a conference via online video is complex, and there are no available options that provide all desirable features for a conference.

Nonetheless, in our opinion Crowdcast is fundamentally unsuitable, due to a dependency on mouse interaction & the lack of any support or a timeline for support for captioning.

Based on feedback, the community team is in the process of revamping their plans and writing new documentation so projects can move forward.

Accessible Streaming Setup Options

One example of an acceptable accessible model for video streaming is that used by the WPCampus conferences and by the recent WP BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Talk event:

  • Stream through YouTube
  • Embed their player and chat on the website.
  • Caption ingestion goes through the YouTube player and are embedded separately with a link to the captions so they can be in a separate window

There are many viable solutions to this, each requiring a different set of choices to have all the desirable features; but Crowdcast should not be used on its own.

For events continuing to use Crowdcast:

  • Be aware that speakers with disabilities may be unable to speak due to this change.
  • Please do not use Crowdcast to deliver the public-facing access to the stream.

Other options, such as Zoom, are also viable. While Zoom has come under fire for security and privacy reasons, they are a highly accessible video streaming tool.

Tips for Accessible Online Presentations

Many of the helpful ways you can make your presentations accessible online are the same as those for in-person talks: such as providing captions, describing whats on your screen, or repeating questions.

In the online presentation environment, these same concerns become even more important – unstable internet connections may introduce problems with audio or video that make captions and descriptions of visuals even more crucial.

When you’re presenting online, try to do what you can to give people a great experience:

  • Disable apps that might be consuming your bandwidth, such as Dropbox or cloud backup apps.
  • Use an external microphone, and not your computer’s microphone pickup.
  • Reduce background noise as much as possible.
  • Speak clearly, slowly, and enunciate to the best of your ability.
  • Describe the essential visuals on the screen – you don’t need to give every detail, but be specific.
  • Provide links to resources as you go.

Enjoy your presenting!

Enrique Sánchez 6:31 pm on April 2, 2020
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Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: April 3, 2020

This is the proposed agenda for the 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) team meeting on Friday, April 3, 2020, 16:00 UTC.

If you’d like to add an item for discussion, please add a comment and we’ll add it to the agenda.

The Accessibility bug scrub will be held on Friday, April 3, 2020, 15:00 UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#agenda

Jb Audras 11:20 pm on March 27, 2020  

Accessibility Team meeting notes – March 27, 2020

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.

Feedback on the CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. audit being performed by the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.-css team

Context: the Core CSS team proposed to launch a CSS audit of WP-Admin in the #core-css channel. They recently asked the design team for input on what they would like to see covered in the audit, and it would be great to also have some input from the accessibility team. They have a bunch of tickets to track everything audit-related:

  • Determine methodology recommendations for CSS audit – #49638
  • Create a report outline for CSS audit – #49637
  • Add visual regression testing to core – #49606

Everyone is welcome to comment on the above tickets.

@afercia shared some general considerations: while an admin CSS audit is extremely necessary, there’s also the risk to overdo and enter the “refactor for the sake of refactoring” territory. He would definitely recommend the css-team to start with baby steps and avoid bigger changes, at least at the beginning.
There are also some CSS properties that are a no-go. For example, all the ones that change the visual order e.g. flex order, flex-direction row-reverse, column-reverse and so on. Also simple things like list-style: none may significantly impact assistive technologies or the way some browsers expose information to assistive technologies.

@joedolson also wanted to ensure we are all on the same page concerning browsers support. @audrasjb answered WP-Admin doesn’t officially supports less than IE11 and @afercia added that it is safe to assume we can remove all CSS related to old IE and prepended with .ie7 – .ie8. See also this Trac ticket for reference.

5.4 post-mortem on Make/Core blog

The WordPress Accessibility team published their position concerning default fullscreen mode on the block editor.

As this change is going to land in WordPress 5.4 –it was announced during the last dev chat– @audrasjb pointed out that the content of the Accessibility Team’post could be used to write a 5.4 post-mortem, and he is going to coordinate with @francina to write this post on Make/Core. It will be a team effort to ensure that all the Accessibility Team viewpoints are captured. @ryokuhi is also available to help on this.

@mapk added he is also organizing some people from Automattic to help wrangle support forums for this releaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software.. They will probably have some feedback there.

Accessibility team’s work kick-off for 5.5

The team defined the main projects to focus on for WordPress 5.5:

  • Accessible color schemes: Provide some accessible color schemes for WP-Admin. Lead: @joedolson. @ryokuhi also proposed to help on this project.
  • Alternative WP List Tables views: Propose an alternative way to display List Tables in WP-Admin – ticket #49715
  • “Howdy fly-out menu”: Refine/replace the upper-right WP-Admin fly-out menu.

There are also 29 other TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets milestoned for 5.5.

WP Accessibility Day update

Next meeting scheduled on Tuesday March 31, 2020 at 16:30 UTC.

Enrique Sánchez 9:59 pm on March 26, 2020
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Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: March 27, 2020

This is the proposed agenda for the 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) team meeting on Friday, March 27, 2020, 16:00 UTC .

If you’d like to add an item for discussion, please add a comment and we’ll add it to the agenda.

The Accessibility bug scrub will be held on Friday, March 27, 2020, 15:00 UTC .

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#agenda

Jb Audras 9:39 am on March 24, 2020
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WordPress Accessibility Team position on default full screen mode in the editor

During the last weekly meeting, the team discussed the recent change of default to the full-screen mode in the editor. There is a general concern about the usability and 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) implications this new default setting will have.

As a starting point, the WordPress Accessibility team is opposed to this change as it breaks some 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/. success criteria:

  • Success criteria 3.2.3: Consistent navigation
    “The intent of this Success Criterion is to encourage the use of consistent presentation and layout for users who interact with repeated content within a set of Web pages and need to locate specific information or functionality more than once.”
  • Success criteria 3.2.4: Consistent identification
    “The intent of this Success Criterion is to ensure consistent identification of functional components that appear repeatedly within a set of Web pages. A strategy that people who use screen readers use when operating a Web site is to rely heavily on their familiarity with functions that may appear on different Web pages.”

The main issue is that the fullscreen mode (when it’s activated by default) removes the top bar and admin menus. Navigation should stay consistent in the whole admin experience. There is another similar issue in WordPress admin, but this change happened years ago. This is not a reason to reproduce such a mistake.

If this change is here to stay, it would be nice to add a modal to explain how to restore the normal mode as this is not easily discoverable for the moment.

The current mechanism to exit full screen is a “Go Back” button using the WordPress Logo that sends the user to the posts list. It is worth noting that users are not necessarily coming from the posts list, and the “go back” button (WordPress logo) is not relevant as it takes the users back to a screen that wasn’t necessarily visited before.

There is also a concern about the date on which this change was introduced. If it had been introduced during the development cycle, the Accessibility team could have provided proper information to the 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/ team on the accessibility issues concerning this feature.

This change breaks the rule decided for WP 5.4: new features and enhancements can’t land during 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. cycle. While the full-screen feature itself is not a new feature, the change to including it as the default behavior constitutes a significant change 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. and how many users will use the editor. The related ticket was opened and merged only few hours before WordPress 5.4 RCRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. 1.

If this feature is going to stay in WordPress 5.4, the accessibility team believes it will need a post mortem on Make/CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. The goal would be to avoid this situation (including changes that late in the releaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software. cycle) being repeated in future releases and to make sure important changes introduced in WordPress are accessibility compliant.

Note also that this change was discussed in the #core Slack channel during the March 9, 2020 devchat meeting and the majority of the attendees appeared to be opposed to it. In conclusion @chanthaboune was going to give feedback to the project lead. As no decision has been communicated for now, the accessibility team assumes this change is probably going to stay in WordPress 5.4.

#core-editor, #gutenberg

Enrique Sánchez 6:34 pm on March 20, 2020
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Accessibility Team meeting notes – March 20, 2020

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.

Discussion and next steps on the team’s position about the new default full screen mode in the editor

Continuing the discussion from two weeks ago, the team agreed to formulate in writing our position opposing this change and the accessibility implications it will have.

@audrasjb volunteered to start a document to summarize our position.

Suggest follow-up tasks and improvements for the Table blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.

The team discussed and agreed to reopen this issue about missing important features in the Table block.

@joedolson volunteered to reopen and summarize what still needs to be done.

Discussion of the new permalink 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.

We discussed this issue about improvements to the permalink UI in the block editor. We feel the new UI works pretty well now and we’d like to see the inaccessible one be removed.

@nrqsnchz will pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” the issue and request for the removal of the old UI.

#meeting-notes

Enrique Sánchez 7:11 pm on March 19, 2020
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Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: March 20, 2020

This is the proposed agenda for the 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) team meeting on Friday, March 20, 2020 at 16:00 UTC

If you’d like to add an item for discussion, please add a comment and we’ll add it to the agenda.

The Accessibility bug scrub will be held on Friday, March 20, 2020 at 15:00 UTC

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#agenda

Enrique Sánchez 9:18 pm on March 13, 2020  

Accessibility Team meeting notes – March 13, 2020

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.

Discussion of changing date for WP Accessibility Day

The team discussed the possibility of changing the date for the WordPress Accessibility Day event, currently planned for Saturday, September 26. It was recently brought up that a Saturday might impact some members’ participation due to religious observance.

Considering that the other option would be to move the event to a weekday, it is unclear to us if this will also have an impact on folks who wouldn’t be able to attend due to work-related activities.

We agreed to follow up with the Community team and ask for advice.

Accessibility feedback on the new <LinkControl> component

The team was asked to help with testing and feedback on the new LinkControl component.

Accessibility feedback on a proposal to include date as context for link search results

The team reviewed this proposal to include date as context for link search results. While we don’t see adding the date as an accessibility concern, we found a couple of issues with the current 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.. Our feedback was added to the issue.

Accessibility feedback on proposed improvements to the color picker.

The team discussed these proposed semantic improvements to the color picker. We don’t have a strong preference and think that using radio buttons could work with some caveats. We left feedback on the issue.

+make.wordpress.org/core/

Enrique Sánchez 6:10 pm on March 12, 2020
Tags:   

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: March 13, 2020

This is the proposed agenda for the 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) team meeting on Friday March 13, 2020 at 16:00UTC.

If you’d like to add an item for discussion, please add a comment and we’ll add it to the agenda.

The Accessibility bug scrub will be held on Friday March 13, 2020 at 15:00UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#agenda