Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: November 2, 2018

Meeting transcript on Slack

Scheduled bug scrub for 5.0 release

WordPress 5.0 bug scrub sessions are scheduled and listed on this post.

Move meeting and bug scrub timeslot after end of Day Saving Time

The new 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) meetings timeslots are:

Accessibility bug scrub: Friday, 15:00 UTC
Accessibility team meeting: Friday, 16:00 UTC

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/ accessibility documentation

@abrightclearweb got back to working on the documentation but have had to revise a fair bit of what was there due to the UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. changes.

This Document is available here. Feel free to contribute, it is open for comments and suggestions.

Feedback after the Gutenberg Accessibility Report

Note: we refer to the Gutenberg Accessibility Report Post.

@joedolson ’s overall feeling is that it’s been good for exposing issues to the larger community and clarifying the concerns, but it has not had any effect on the proposed schedule.

The Accessibility team members have made their stance clear, and they think it would be nonproductive for the team to continue to make noise about that – if this article wasn’t enough to budge the schedule, then the team needs to embrace what they have and just try to get specific issues resolved.

In that end, @joedolson is going to write a post detailing accessibility improvements in Gutenberg since last Monday, and try and keep positive momentum.

The team agreed that It’s fair to say Gutenberg is better than blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.-based equivalent interfaces because of the accessibility work done.

Side note: If you want to be acknowledged as signatory of the report, please feel free to reply to the first comment with your name.

Notice for assistive technologies users to include in WordPress 5.0

The Accessibility Team ask to include a clear notice to inform users of assistive technologies they can still use the Classic Editor pluginPlugin 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 which is maintained by the WordPress community. 

A Trac ticket was created following this discussion.

Conclusion

The remaining items of the agenda will be discussed during the next Accessibility Team Meeting.

Next meeting: November 9th, 2018 at 16:00 UTC