WP a11y update week 31 2016

Summary team meeting WPa11y team, August 1

Team meeting in Slack.

Retrospective and looking ahead

In @afercia’s words: Since the release cycle is now in RCRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. time this would probably be a perfect time to think at the past months activities, what went well, what could be improved, do you feel there’s anything that makes contributing difficult for you, is there anything you feel it should be done differently? Maybe also start thinking at (realistic) plans for the next release cycle and check time and resources availability for the next months. Maybe we could introduce this kind of “retrospectives questions” after each release cycle.

What went well?

  • We’re alive, more or less in good shape, we improved a bit 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) on WordPress
  • Having a focus each release went well, like heading structure, colour, title attribute
  • Introducing the bug scrubs – even if it doesn’t directly fix tickets it does bring order to the madness
  • Attending and speaking at WordCamps was useful
  • Accessibility tables and workshops on contributor days at WordCamps

And from our sponsors:
WP Site Care sponsored Andrea and Rian to go to the community summit and WCUS15. Yoast sponsors 25% of Andrea’s time to do a11yAccessibility 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) coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. work. And (spoiler alert) Rian will be sponsored too for 25% as from mid August.

What can be improved on

  • We don’t have time resources, people, and skills to start managing accessibility projects. We work on the existing issues but need to start thinking at bigger plans. Patching and patching is someway expected in a so large project with outstanding accessibility issues, at the same time it would be great to start bigger projects.
  • Accessibility is not part of new features since the initial development steps, but something added at a later stage

Do you feel there’s anything that makes contributing difficult for you?

  • Everyone: lack of time
  • Some of the new features, like Shiny Updates and Twenty Sixteen and Fields APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., were initially developed 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/, that makes things more difficult to follow different things on different places
  • The difficulty of monitoring accessibility is that it involves every part of core development. Maybe we need to focus on training the developers, and not in fixing stuf ourselves.
  • A couple more coders would help too
  • The lack of proper screen reader accessibility of 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/. makes it difficult for @arush to contribute.
  • There are accessibility issues on the form to create new tickets and to comment on tickets in TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., which makes it difficult for people using 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 to contribute.

Plans and ideas

  • Spend more time on WPa11y core work and documentation
  • Focus on education developers and designers
  • Training for theme reviews accessibility-ready tag
  • Extend and improve the pattern library
  • Give more workshops on WordCamps
  • Do more a11y audits on core, with recommendations to fix (and not fix ourselves)
  • A monthly or quarterly or whatever worldwide a11y contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/., like the translation day, use also the global a11y awareness day
  • A11y audit on the Trac templates
  • Involve more assistive technologies users on trac, but before that the Trac issues must be solved
  • Start a featured project (the Media maybe?)

Open floor

Maybe we need a statement on Make/Accessibility that the accessibility team is independent and not connected to any company for assistive technology or test software. This to prevent to be claimed by companies for our voluntarily work on 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..

Bug scrub, August 1

We discussed tickets labeled accessibility and with status awaiting review.

Bugscrub in Slack.

#37513: Admin bar sub menu items dashicon and screen readers and
#37511: Dashboard activity 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.: hide the “No activity yet” smiley from assistive technologies
Screen readers behave differently with CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. generated content, for example VoiceOver gets CSS generated content icons as “text” element. The W3C spec says is that something is probably going to change in the next future and CSS generated content, including dashicons, will be probably announced as content by assistive technologies. We should monitor this as a general issue for all the CSS generated content used in WordPress.
Set both tickets to 4.7-early

#37486: Make emojis accessible
Andrea opened this ticket mainly to start a discussion about Emojis. This needs research, Rian will have a go on this.
Set to Future release.

#36925: Media views: introduce a “Heading” view for better accessibility
Set to future release, there is already good work in progress for this ticket.

#36474: Revamp metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. boxes
A ticket for 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./design team to handle, the label accessibility is only added to keep informed about relevant UI changes.

#36447: Responsive preview icons in 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. need tooltips
We agreed that tooltips are necessary. Best = Icon + text and Second best = Icon + aria-label/tooltip. Good example is GitHub handles the icons with aria-label and tooltips. @arush mentioned grease monkey script  to help those who aren’t power users deal with them on the NVaccess Github
Set to Future Release and assigned @iamjolly as owner

And other news that came by during this week

Josh Pollock, the 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 author of Caldera Forms, started working on fixing accessibility issues in his plugin. You can follow his progress for Caldera Forms in GitHub. Feedback is welcome.

#accessibility-team-meetup, #bug-scrub