This week in WordPress Accessibility, October 24, 2017

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/..

Transcript in Slack

Please note: the times of our meetings have changed.

Handbook

Because of work and holidays, the last month not much work was done on the handbook. But as from now we will pick up writing again. The goal still is to have the handbook finished mid March 2018 (with all the text ready for review around mid January).

Tickets/Issues for contributor days

We need a page to refer to on contributor days with a list of tickets and issues to work on. Preferable tickets without a long history of discussion. Like “good-first-bugs” or keyword related tickets or GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ “Good first issue”. @afrecia provided a list and Rian will create the page.

Our focus for 5.0

For the WordPress 5.0 release we will focus on 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) of Gutenberg. There are still a lot of Gutenberg a11y tickets open and discussions to be held and testing to be done.

HTML5 landmarks

Marco Zehe published recently: Firefox 57 will be less chatty to screen readers in some situations. FireFox will treat HTML5 landmarks differently. This has implications for the changes just made in the Underscores theme. @samikeijonen is researching this.

Also Apple VoiceOver doesn’t announce the footer if no role="contentinfo" is added. This seems like a bug.

We will wait until FireFox 57 is officially out and will test this with FF/NVDA and Safari/Voiceover.

Good reads

The Evolution Of Gutenberg – Has It Improved? by Claire Brotherton
Accessibility for everyone by Laura Kalberg (A Book Apart)
More good reads in the a11yweekly mailing list by @davidakennedy

#accessibility-team-meetup