Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: 9 August 2019

Meeting transcript on Slack

Call for Testers: Support Navigation and Edit Mode

For reference, see the related pull request on Gutenberg GitHub repository.

Lacking a pre-release version to share, we’ll wait on the official release of 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/ 6.3, then publish a call for testers. Release is expected on Wednesday, August 14th.

Joe Dolson will write up the call for testing.

WP 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) Day

Will pass off further discussion of WP Accessibility Day to the volunteer organizing team. Need to establish a method to coordinate between organizing team & then plan periodic reports back to the Accessibility team on progress.

@audrasjb & @joedolson will coordinate that.

Ticket Ownership for WordPress 5.3

Proposed schedule has been published, so we have some idea of what to target. Proposed schedule is for November 12th, so we’ll operate on the assumption of a probably September 23rd betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process..

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 members should spend time reviewing the tickets slated for next release to identify candidates they believe they have time to coordinate on.

Even if a ticket has an owner, a lack of activity may suggest that the owner will be open to changing the assignment.

Need to communicate more with the Media team to get ownership of the many Media tickets targeted for this release.

Don’t hesitate to request feedback from various teams by assigning task-related keywords to a ticket – this can be significantly more effective than trying to pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” an individual for feedback.

Open Floor

Work on re-thinking the 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. sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. has been slow; trying to get that re-started as the summer winds down.

@arush mentioned earlier that 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/. threads are now accessible; need to do some research to identify whether we should now allow them in meetings.

@joedolson will contact Amanda to ask for her thoughts.

@joedolson has started working on updating .screen-reader-text info; but it’s been slow.

Discussed mobile device skip link issue addressed.