IRC Meeting: March 13, 2013

We had a little mix-up with the meeting time this week, due to the change to Daylight Savings Time in the US, so this meeting report may be a little shorter than usual.

However, the weekly meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. time remains at 20:00 UTC until the end of the month — when we may review and adjust it. Remember that you can convert UTC time to your local time at Worldtimeserver.com.

Custom Menus

This still remains the main focus of interest via Trac ticket 14045 and it is making real progress — thanks to sterling work from @lessbloat, @ceo and @grahamarmfield. But WordPress 3.6 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. is now very close, so we may have to settle for implementing the considerable improvements already made and look at tweaking the new 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) options in a future enhancement ticket.

On a positive note, this will give us the opportunity to gather as much feedback as possible from different screen reader users once WordPress 3.6 is released.

Comment Form

@shaun_10up has been submitting new patches to Ticket 15080 to try and ensure that all information within the comment forum is being rendered in screen readers. However, during testing, a significant difference in the way that screen reader software handles content within forms was noticed that could make the suggested change ineffective. As a result — and again with WordPress 3.6 beta looming — we may have to abandon the current ticket whilst an alternative, acceptable, solution is devised.

Documentation

The Accessibility page for the Theme Developer’s handbook is now complete. Changes to the Theme Review Guidelines to incorporate an Accessibility section are ongoing but nearly complete.

TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. Tickets

@joedolson has suggested that we need to get involved in Ticket #23295 which is looking at a method of improving warnings in situation where the login session has expired. We need to ensure that any content changes are announced to screen reader users in these situations.

Longer term, perhaps we need to ask for a new workflow-keyword to be added to the list of those available in Trac — e.g. a11y-feedback? The tag ui-feedback already exists but, as we all know, usability and accessibility are not the same thing. Plus a new tag would allow us to easily flag up tickets where we foresee possible issues and allow for closer monitoring.

Thoughts?

#wordpress-ui log for March 13, 2013.

#comment-form, #meetup, #menus, #trac-2