WordPress Accessibility Day: kickoff meeting notes

Slack transcript of the meeting

The initial planning meeting for the proposed WordPress 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) event occurred on Tuesday, December 17th 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.

Goals of the Event

What do we hope to achieve with this event?

  • Build awareness in the WordPress community around accessibility
  • Develop the accessibility knowledge of the members of the WordPress community

Outcomes

  • Things to measure: participants, number of live events, participation follow-up behaviors
  • Can we set practical numeric goals with no prior comparison? Perhaps specific goal setting is a thing for a repeat WPA11y Day.
  • Consider possible goal targets as we develop the event further.

Logistics

We made the decision to plan a 24 hour event, world-wide. Currently planning is targeted towards a date in late September, to avoid collisions with major WordPress releases, WordCamps Asia, EU, and US, and to also try and avoid the probable date for ID24.

A secondary goal is to prepare a mini-event to promote this as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) 2020.

Naming

The official name of the event will be ‘WordPress Accessibility Day’.

The next meeting is tentatively proposed for Tuesday January 14th 2020 at 16:00 UTC. In the next meeting we’ll further examine the logistics, refine the timeline, and begin to discuss content.