Team Chat Summary August 10, 2015

About Us

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 shares accessibility expertise across the project to improve the accessibility of WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and resources.

WordPress targets WCAG 2.1 at level AA as the standard for development.

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For support related to WordPress & accessibility, visit the WordPress Accessibility forum.

You can also ask questions during Accessibility Team Office Hours every Wednesday at 14:00 UTC 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/..

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.

When we have it shaped up we will add the planning documentation to this blog in the form of pages and sub-pages to make it a community resource.

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