Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: 3 January 2020

Meeting transcript on Slack

Update on the 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) Day

The project kickoff meeting took place on Tuesday, December 17th. The meeting summary is available.

Proposed date for the next WordPress Accessibility Day meeting is Tuesday 14 January 2020 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. If you would like to propose another meeting date, please comment in the meeting summary post.

Update on the 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/ focus handling research work

Last month, the accessibility team made some testing on how Gutenberg handles focus on the various blocks. Thanks @enrique, @markdubois, @vicent, @gziolo, @audrasjb and @joedolson for their contribution.

@joedolson completed the focus handling tests & written up observations on it in a document.

Next steps:

  • Publish the summary on Make/Accessibility
  • Open related issues on Gutenberg 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/ repository

WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Asia – contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.

WordCamp Asia will host a contributor day and plan to set up an Accessibility table. All accessibility team members who plan to attend the WordCamp are welcome to volunteer to lead the table. Please comment below if you are interested.

Accessibility team goals for WordPress 5.4

@audrasjb: It would be great to define a primary focus for the team, for the next major releaseMajor Release A set of releases or versions having the same major version number may be collectively referred to as “X.Y” -- for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, and all other versions in the 5.2. (five dot two dot) branch of that software. Major Releases often are the introduction of new major features and functionality., WordPress 5.4. It’s not mandatory to have a main focus, but with 5.3 the primary goal of the team was the Admin CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. changes and it was quite effective.

@sabernhardt added one goal would be fixing more issues from the Gutenberg audit (maybe not primary focus though).

@nataliemac asked if it’s possible for accessible color schemes to be a focus for 5.4.

Accessible color schemes is a very nice project but it will probably have to wait for 5.5 in August, as 5.4 development must to be almost completed in 4 week. The idea is to plan major goals for 5.5 in the next few weeks and to focus on smaller tasks (TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets and Gutenberg issues) for 5.4.

This Trac report can be used to pick up small focuses for 5.4. On Gutenberg side, that would be nice to address a couple of issues from the audit.