Joe Dolson 6:17 pm on February 15, 2019  

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: February 15th

Meeting notes on Slack

Lack of Agendas & publishing of notes

  • We’ve struggled to get agendas and notes published recently, due to personal issues.
  • Will get all notes caught up with today (@joedolson)
  • Want to devise a better system for preparing agendas, that takes into account who will be present at any given meeting.
  • Last week’s meeting agenda contained numerous items where nobody present had relevant new information.
  • People anticipating attending a meeting should contact team reps if they have a topic they’d like to raise

Updates on Gutenberg user docs

  • Still no updates on Github or elsewhere
  • Mentioned in update chat with @chanthaboune; hope to get some information soon.
  • Should we publish the docs for assistive technology ourselves, or would that just create long-term confusion?

WordPress 5.2 Release schedule

  • Release schedule has been set for late April.
  • Time frame will not allow for Uniform Search
  • We believe it does give space for us to accomplish the 32 accessibility tickets currently slated for next release.
  • @joedolson will take ownership of the Uniform Search ticket so that we can begin planning, aiming to accomplish this in 5.3

Open Floor

  • From @afercia: note new proposal to systematically integrate animated micro-interactions in Gutenberg’s UI.
  • While we don’t have any fundamental problems with this in general, we should comment to ensure that the accessibility concerns with animations are raised.
  • From @afercia: Block specific responsive controls – very complicated and questionable semantics, particularly due to multiple controls that share the same label – labels should be unique. Topic will be discussed in design meeting, as well.
Joe Dolson 6:06 pm on February 15, 2019  

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: February 8th

Meeting notes on Slack

Updates on WP 5.2 schedule and goal setting

  • No known schedule, nobody present has an update.
  • Discussed Uniform Search – what it is, what it would require, and what we need in order to have time for it.

Updates on Gutenberg user docs

  • Pinged @dryanpress for updates, no response.
  • Apparently no action on Github issue since January 15th.

Updates on Gutenberg phase II

  • Major discussions since last week’s meeting on the topic of navigating between blocks and sidebar (inspector)
  • Lots of promising ideas and engagement; working to reach a decision and implementation.
  • Work is developing on the Navigation menu block. Navigation menus are one of the more complicated and essential features, so accessibility should monitor this in an ongoing manner.

Open Floor

Discussed goals with @vossisboss to identify a good path for participation.

Post meeting follow-up:

@greatislander showed up shortly after the meeting with an update on automated testing:

  • Initial idea of packaging as a plug-in proved infeasible due to the size of the package.
  • Waiting on updates for the publication of axe-jest-puppetteer packages to NPM (anticipated around 5.1 release.)
Joe Dolson 5:55 pm on February 15, 2019  

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: February 1st

Meeting notes on Slack

Gutenberg Phase 2 Widgets Screen

  • Goal is to start using blocks on the widgets screen; building out blocks to match existing widgets
  • Discussion of the general design, layout and accessibility of new page
  • Current design repurposes Gutenberg layout
  • Reproduces same issues with sidebar as in Gutenberg editor
  • Should we focus on improving the Sidebar UI or different design in Widgets?
  • Design should be consistent; so fixing the Sidebar UI is important
  • Many possible issues to address; top priority is topbar/inspector (Sidebar) navigation

Validate 5.2 Accessibility focused tickets scope / Triage update

Currently 30 accessibility tickets milestoned for 5.2. All of them have owners. Depending on 5.2 schedule, we may not be able to handle more.

5.2 schedule is currently an unknown factor.

Current goal: handle these 30 tickets for 5.2, revise based on schedule.
Ambition goal: work on #31818 (Uniform Search) if 5.2 schedule allows.

Joe Dolson 5:45 pm on February 15, 2019  

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: January 25th

Apologies for the late report. We’re working on getting caught up!

Meeting notes on Slack

Individual availabilility in coming months

The majority of attendees have 1-4 hours per week available. We’d like to take some time to come up with better usage of time for those who have only very small amounts of availability, as anybody with only 1-2 hours a week is essentially only attending meetings.

Update on Automated Testing projects

  • Axe tests are running against Twenty Nineteen
  • Setup is clunky because the NPM packages aren’t published yet
  • Next steps:
    • Make it easier to install/run tests against any theme
    • Possible to install dependencies without requiring a clone of Gutenberg
    • Goal: installable as a plugin for easy installation
  • Joe Dolson will update the accessibility theme unit test data for use in theme testing. Needs to incorporate Gutenberg block output.

Update from research team/Gutenberg user testing

  • No one was present with information to report.

Verify team About page is up to date

  • Agreed that the info is essentially accurate, although we may want to make some changes anyway. Joe Dolson will review and report back.
  • Question whether the team has any materials on WP specific accessibility testing workflows; shared the accessibility-ready theme testing guidelines, which are already included on the About page.

Tickets for discussion:

  • https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4091
  • https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/38338

Discussion on 4091 (Slack)

Discussion on 38338 (Slack)

Josepha 6:10 pm on February 13, 2019
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Josepha 5:31 am on February 6, 2019
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Jb Audras 2:37 pm on February 1, 2019  

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: February 1st

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly accessibility team meeting on Friday 1 February 2019 at 16:00.

  1. Gutenberg phase 2 Widgets screen – GitHub Issue 13204
  2. Validate 5.2 Accessibility focused tickets scope / Triage update
  3. Open floor

If you have any additional topics to propose, please comment below.

Accessibility Bug scrub will happen on Friday 1 February 2019 at 15:00

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

Andrea Fercia 1:14 pm on January 25, 2019  

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: January 25th

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly accessibility team meeting on Friday 25 January 2019 at 16:00

  1. Individual availability for the incoming months
  2. Update on automated testing projects
  3. Update from Research team/Gutenberg user testing process and communication
  4. Verify the team About page is up to date: https://wordpress.org/about/accessibility/
  5. Discuss tickets https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4091 and https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/38338
  6. Open floor

If you have any additional topics to propose, please comment below.

Accessibility Bug scrub will happen on Friday 25 January 2019 at 15:00

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

Jb Audras 4:50 pm on January 24, 2019
Tags: accessibility-testing, research   

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: January 18th

Meeting notes on Slack

Update on WP Campus Gutenberg Audit

Tenon LLC will conduct the accessibility audit of the Block Editor. It expects to take 4 weeks. The vendor will also be able to submit issues and possibly pull requests to the Gutenberg Github repository.

@bamadesigner and @bdeconinck are going to share an update of the process at WPCampus Online on January 31.

Audit expected timeline:

  • Wednesday, January 9: Project kickoff meeting
  • Thursday, January 31: Progress update at WPCampus Online
  • Late February: Audit report released

Update on automated testing projects

The team created a GitHub project to track ideas and progress on these projects. WordPress automated accessibility testing project.

These tasks are handled on #accessibility-testing slack channel.

An important pull request have recently been merged.

Future release(s) goals and triage/milestoning to help accessibility focused tickets to land in 5.1.x or 5.2

A lot of 5.1 accessibility tickets where moved to 5.2 or Future Release. The team will have to clean-up the awaiting review queue as soon as possible and then scrub the future release report.

@afercia and @audrasjb to scrub the awaiting review queue (even outside official bug-scrub sessions) to help in speeding up the process.

Block Editor updates and planning

Gutenberg 4.8 is going to land in WP 5.1, scheduled for February 21th. And one of the Gutenberg phase 2 focuses is porting Widgets to Blocks.

Also, there is a Research Team doing user testing. The plan is to expand that to more tester. Help is welcome in Research Team Slack channel: #research.

To substantially improve Gutenberg accessibility, usability testing sessions should include persons with accessibility needs:

  • screen reader user
  • speech input user
  • low vision user who uses magnification software
  • switch input user
  • …

@karmatosed to co-ordinate with the Research Team to get their input, and to publish a call for tester in Make/Design (cross-posted in Make/Accessibility).

Individual availability for the incoming months

For now, @afercia made a great effort on Gutenberg phase 1, to raise and follow GitHub issues and pull requests. The Accessibility Team needs more people with accessibility and React skills to help during Gutenberg phase 2.

  • @ryanshoover can help to recruit on specific issues.
  • @vossisboss and @samikeijonen are currently learning React.
  • @ryelle to help out with specific tasks she can be pointed to.

Efforts should be made to ease following and giving feedback on any new development that impacts accessibility, starting with creating properly labelled issues on GitHub.

The agenda item wasn’t fully covered during the meeting. The Accessibility Team will address this as the first item on the next meeting agenda.

Josepha 2:35 pm on January 22, 2019
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X-post: Our Strengths and Challenges

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