Sami Keijonen 6:14 am on October 23, 2018  

Team meeting October 15, 2018

Transcript meeting in Slack

Agenda for the meeting

  • The future of 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: role and goals of the a11y team in the WordPress project, considering the current 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) coding standards.
  • Decisional process in the a11y team.
  • Role of the a11y team reps.
  • Based on the approved reps role, nominees for the reps
  • The quarterly team updates for wordpress.org news https://wordpress.org/news/
  • Open floor

The future of a11y team: role and goals of the a11y team in the WordPress project, considering the current accessibility coding standards

At 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. US 2015 in Philadelphia the a11y team prepared a proposal for accessibility coding standards to be included in WordPress.

These can be found on the accessibility coding standard page. One of the main points is this:

All new or updated code released in WordPress must conform with the 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/. 2.0 guidelines at level AA. 

In the meeting we discussed that an accessibility coding standard is a little different than other coding standards.

  • Not everything can be measured or fixed by automated tools.
  • It involves design and pretty much every other part of the development process.
  • It needs experience outside of code on how users use tools like WordPress.

The team also discussed the wording of the a11y coding standard. Is there a reason to change “must” conform with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines to “should” conform with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines?

Accessibility team decided to keep the current wording  – All new or updated code released in WordPress must conform with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. This raises a couple of questions.

  • If 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/ has issues that violates accessibility coding standard and guidelines, can the release date be changed before issues are solved? In short, the a11y team doesn’t have the power to make that decision.
  • What is the point of having standards if they’re not enforced? We can only recommend the a11y standards, and keep on working to reach that goal.

Decisional process in the a11y team

Meeting agendas, proposals, and decisions should (see what I did there) be published in this blog. We should also vote and document issues that do not have another place for discussion and decision making.

In short, let’s keep the same process as before.

Team representatives (reps)

Team reps is about

  • representing the team
  • speaking on behalf of the team
  • propose the agenda
  • run the meeting
  • write the meeting notes

We were hoping to get two to four volunteers so that the role can rotate every three months. Joe Dolson and JB Audras are interested to take on the team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. role. The team will decide on the new reps in the next meeting.

The quarterly team updates for wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ news

In every three month there are short updates from teams in News site.

  •  What is the team’s one-sentence top priority right now (and what’s the ETA)?
  • What struggles is the team having?
  • What is one thing you are all proud of this quarter?

From this meeting there were no volunteers to write the summary but in general this can be done from summary meeting notes.

Open floor

We all agreed that Rian Rietveld is awesome. There is no way we can fit in her shoes. But hopefully we have shoes of our own.