Summary team meeting WPa11y team, August 23
Focus for WP 4.7
@davidakennedy suggested: “Since new user experience will be a focus: maybe there’s a11y 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) items we can improve related to that? First-time installs, theme activation, etc.”. And we agreed that this is a good idea.
Some suggestions that came up:
- let the test team do the famous 5-minute install with different AT
- focus exclusively on the experience with default themes
- plugins: only install, active, deactivate, remove
- check for and address any existing problems
- see whether there are any major changes proposed for WP 4.7 and test those
- hashtag #a11y-firstinstall for tickets
@trishasales and @rianrietveld have time for this.
Theme reviews
@joedolson completed a couple reviews in the last two weeks. Robert Jolly (@iamjolly) is joining Joe and David in reviewing themes for the accessibility 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)-ready tag.
Documentation
Robert Jolly is also going to help Trisha and Rachel Vasquez (@rachievee) with a high level overview and some Project Management for the handbook. The goal is to reinstate the hierarchy that started at WordCamp 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. US and build/modify as needed. There will be a Google hangout next Thursday to get this started.
Open floor
Joe brought up the following:
“We have a list of accessibility related plugins. These are not all of the accessibility-related plugins in the repository. Some plugins are not helping accessibility and a few are even harmful. Do we, or should we have a specific policy governing which plugins we’ll list there?”
We agreed on not having an official certification/approval system for plugins like we have for the accessibility-ready themes.
Joe, Robert and Rian are going to look at the plugins tagged for accessibility and investigate if there are plugins that claim to improve a11y but are actually harmful or doing things that are really not beneficial.
Also we can extent the list with plugins on Useful Tools we think are good.
Bug scrub
This week there was no bug scrub, someone needed a holiday…
And other news that came by during this week
- Modern Tribe is now sponsoring time for Trisha Sales to spend on work for the accessibility team.
- Rachel Carden (@bamadesigner) published a nice plugin 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 wa11y , for testing a website for accessibility with e.g. WAVE and Tota11y.
- @michael.heuberger is working on a plugin using JavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. to integrate a video in a form submission. This way deaf users can submit their response in sign language.
#accessibility-team-meetup
