Accessibility Team meeting notes for 13 December 2019

These are the weekly notes for 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) team meeting that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.

Meeting plans for remainder of December 2019

The team agreed to take a break from meetings and bug scrubs for the remainder of December 2019 and a such, today was our last meeting and bug scrub of the year.

The team was also reminded of the WordPress Global Accessibility Day initial planning meeting, which will be held on Tuesday 17 December 2019 at 16:00 UTC in the #accessibility-events 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.

Easier testing 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/ PRs with gutenberg.run

http://gutenberg.run is a service by @aduth that provides temporary live preview sites for Gutenberg pull requests.

This will allow us to view and test Gutenberg PRs without the need to have a local development environment set up and running. Testing and providing feedback should be much easier for a lot of us.

It’s important to note that http://gutenberg.run is a work in progress, and as such some bugs can happen. The project is open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL., so if you want to report bugs or follow along on its development, you can do so in the project’s GitHub repository.

Status and follow up plans for the Accessibility Audit project board on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/

The team was reminded of the Gutenberg Accessibility Audit project board on GitHub which was created after the WP Campus accessibility audit that was performed earlier this year.

We noticed how 60 issues have already been closed, 8 are in progress and 27 are still in the To do list.

Now that gutenberg.run is available, we hope that the team can provide the necessary testing and feedback and make some progress on these issues.

Updates on the team’s current projects

@joedolson updated the team on the progress that has been made on the research work of focus handling in Gutenberg blocks we started recently.

Joe noted that now that most of the initial research has been done, some patterns are starting to emerge and we’ve been able to identify predominant behaviors and oddities.

Joe will collate the list and ask follow-up questions to some of the testers for clarification. We’ll add screen-reader testing to the research so we can identify how each scenario is announced.

We also revisited the idea that came up recently of adding accessible color schemes to wp-admin. Now that we have access to the GitHub and SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/. 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 repositories we are in a position to make progress.

The team agreed to come back to this project next year after the break.

Open Floor

On the topic of accessible color schemes, @steelwagstaff shared some previous accessible color scheme work done for PressBooks that should be useful to the team.

#meeting-notes