This week in WordPress Accessibility, November 27, 2017

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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/..

Weekly meeting

Transcript meeting in Slack

Handbook

Should we use <pre><code> or <pre> or shortcodes like [ php ] for displaying code examples? The shortcodeShortcode A shortcode is a placeholder used within a WordPress post, page, or widget to insert a form or function generated by a plugin in a specific location on your site. adds a table, VoiceOver doesn’t announce this well and also jumps unexpectedly out of the code example.
Conclusion discussion: we need to do more research, also with other screen readers and see how they perform.

New articles:

Post about forms need a bit of text tweaking
Post about archive page needs some addition text with discussion

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/

Two tests are still open:

Test the Gutenberg inserter
Test the Gutenberg toolbar roving tabindex

Pause meeting for the holidays

We will skip the meetings on December 25th and January 1st.

Items on the To-do list

Research screen reader performance for code short codes like [ php ] or [ htmlHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. ]
Write up a summary of things that will change in WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/. 2.1 for designers and developers
Tests Gutenberg

VoiceOver on MacOS High Sierra

VoiceOver can finally read multi-language content. When it detects a different language, it switches to a synthesizer in that language.

Also new to VoiceOver is something equally new to iOSiOS The operating system used on iPhones and iPads. 11: image descriptions. VoiceOver (VO) has been speaking the main objects in pictures since last year, but that was only for photos you’d stored in a Photos library. Now, you can press vo-shift-l while VO is on a picture to get a description, if the current app supports the feature. This even includes text recognition, letting you hear what’s in an image, even if it’s a screenshot or meme. Time will tell just how well this works in practice, but it’s great to see such a powerful feature being introduced, even if the artificial intelligence behind it seems to need more tweaking.

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) news / good reads

Important information for users of Mozilla Firefox, seems we shouldn’t test with Firefox and JAWS and discourage users to use this combo until important technical issues in the new Firefox Quantum get solved.
(Updated) In-Process Halloween 2017: Firefox 57, Windows Fall Creators Update, Australian NDIS and more, seems also with NVDA there are some performance issues, though not as severe as with JAWS
Firefox 57 from an NVDA user’s perspective, by Marco Zehe
7 Ways Form Accessibility Can Boost Conversions by Hazel Bolton

#accessibility-team-meetup