Ideas for the accessibility team at the Community Summit 2017

What can 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 do on the  2017 WordPress Community Summit (CS) before WordCampWordCamp 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. Europe in Paris?

Here some ideas, comment below this post if you want to join the CS for the accessibility (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)) team or if you have suggestions or remarks.

Note: the deadline for submission is March 3, 2017.
So we should make final decisions on the a11y team meeting 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/. on Februari 27.

1. Proposed topics

The editor

@joedolson did a writeup on safeguarding the accessibility of the new editor. We have to make plans on how to provide our a11y expertise and resources to the editor team.

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.

The same counts for the customizer as for the new editor. Although this is a feature already is in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., it continuously needs our attentions and work.

Education

How to educate developers and designers more effectively. Ideas: better documentation, different approach for the handbook, accessibility talks, reviews, training, courses, a Day of A11y, etc…

Get more developers and designers involved

Set up a plan how to involve more coders and designers to work on a11y tickets in WordPress trac. And if people are joining, how to keep them involved for a longer time.

Pattern library

We need to review our 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/ repo a11y theme patterns. Is this the place we want to publish code and is the code still valid (some of it is 2 years old). Does the code validate for WordPress code standards, etc..

The handbook

After a few years of trying we just don’t seem to find the time and people to set this up. My proposal is to leave the concept of writing stuff ourselves but instead build a great list of resources and put WordPress specific issues in the core handbook.

2. Representatives

So far Andrea Fercia, David Kennedy (probably), Morten Rand Hendriksen, Rian Rietveld and Sami Keijonen (if he can find a sponsor) want to be at the CS.
Anyone else wants to represent the a11y team?

3. Help with the organisation of the event

The CS organisers ask for one or two contributors who are willing to help with: posts, communication, travel assistance, finding sponsors, etc.

As for the a11y team: the travel expenses of Andrea, David and Rian will be covered by their employers. It would be nice if we could find a sponsor for Sami.
Who wants to volunteer or sponsor this Community Summit??

Please put your ideas in the comments, we will discuss this on the accessibility team meeting in Slack February 27, 18:00 UTC.