WordPress Accessibility Meeting Notes for 27 Sept 2019

Meeting transcript on Slack

Progress on WordPress 5.3 TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets

31 open tickets in 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) focus remaining. There are a total of 138 open tickets in the 5.3 milestone. 6 tickets relating to contrast and focus have been reopened for continuing work. 32 tickets in the accessibility focus have been fixed.

CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. Changes related to link focus style

After the focus and contrast changes, the link focus style is a dotted outline. This is a regression against the previous release, which used a blue glow focus. Discussed options and agreed that switching to a solid outline and adding and outline offset of 2 pixels will improve. Also noted that the admin nav menu is using the same color as the main focus, needs to be reversed.

This change will also need to be ported to 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/, and that may not be able to happen by 5.3.

Off-agenda: discussion on whether we have time to complete changes.

@karmatosed raised a question whether we should focus on moving continuing changes to 5.4 rather than attempt to complete this for 5.3

After discussion, generally agreed that the continuing changes for focus and contrast are minor tweaks, and while there are a large number of tweaks, we should have time to complete them.

Noted that while release candidateRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. status closes trunk to new enhancements, tweaks to the contrast changes are bugs, and can continue through the RCRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. stage.

Next accessibility bug scrub

Next bug scrub will happen on Tuesday 1 October 2019 at 16:00 UTC in the #accessibility 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/. channel.

Twenty Twenty Status

Twenty Twenty has 9 accessibility labelled issues awaiting attention. @poena raised the menus as the biggest concern, needing review. There’s a PR by @acalfieri waiting to land on the menus – we’ll take a look at it after this is finished.

New EU accessibility standards

Note: on 23 September 2019, the first stage of the European Union directive on accessibility of websites and mobile applications came into force. This stage requires all public sector new websites to be accessible. Existing websites have until 23 September 2020 to be made accessible; all public sector mobile apps have until 23 June 2021.

The EU directive uses 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 at level AA as their reference for a harmonized standard.

After WordPress 5.3, we will discuss updating the WordPress accessibility standards to WCAG 2.1. This was last discussed in October 2018, and was inconclusive.