Accessibility Team Meeting Notes for 28 June 2019

Meeting transcript on Slack

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) amendments to theme review requirements

The theme review team would like to assess adding some of the theme accessibility-ready requirements to the standard requirements for all themes hosted at 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/. They specifically want to focus on requirements with low design impact, anticipating pushback from theme designers.

@joedolson recommended incorporating the keyboard navigation, control, skip link, and form labeling requirements from the existing accessibility-ready requirements.

Briefly discussed why 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/. can’t be directly applied to the theme review process.

WP Theme Auditor

@greatislander provided a summary of the current status of WP Theme Auditor project and invited theme review team members to participate in developing the next steps in the project – better reporting outside of the terminal & making it easier to run the theme auditor via the command line.

@poena Mentioned that the Tide team has data from Lighthouse run in the theme directory previewer.

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/ “Snackbar” 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.

Gutenberg 6.0 introduced a new type of notice used for saving/failure notices, described as “Snackbar” notices.

These notices introduce some accessibility concerns, primarily 1) because they appear in an obscure corner of the screen disassociated from the action that triggered them (problematic for zoom users, tunnel vision caused by various eye disorders, screen readers) and 2) because they automatically disappear after 10 seconds, violating the WCAG timing requirements.

There are additional questions whether this mode of notification is fundamentally valuable. Further discussion will be addressed on GitHub to address whether this is a good method of providing notices; if so, the accessibility issues will be further assessed.