These are the weekly notes for the accessibility 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.
Improve the Handbook recommendation for abbreviations and acronyms
@afercia raised that in Trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket #46980, the accessibility team set some new practices for abbreviations (and acronyms). That would be relevant to add them to the Core Handbook section about abbreviations as well.
Basically:
- Evaluate which abbreviations can be removed in favor of full text
- For the other cases: provide an expansion of the abbreviation/acronym/neuronym in plain text on first use
- Use an
<abbr> to mark up the abbreviation (which provides a hint to user agents on how to announce/display the content) - Do not use
title attributes
@audrasjb to touch base with the Docs team on Monday, to see how the handbook page could be improved.
Edit from Monday: the Docs team doesn’t manage the Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. handbook, it’s under Core team responsibility.
Accessibility team goals for WP 5.5
All the accessibility tickets in the 5.5 milestone can be found using this Trac query.
@joedolson noted that it would make sense to have as a goal is more aggressive work during alpha, so that we can dedicate more attention to the final product during beta 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. & RC A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge..
@afercia added that apart from bugfixes, it would be nice to have at least a couple user-facing accessibility improvements for 5.5.
@audrasjb noted that milestone 5.5 will be open for commit right after WP 5.4 Release Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. 1 is out.
The team tried to summarize the main current projects of the team for Core and to get somebody to take point on each project:
- Accessible color schemes: Provide some accessible color schemes for WP-Admin. Milestoned to WP 5.5. Lead: @joedolson
- Alternative WP List Tables views: Propose an alternative way to display List Tables in WP-Admin. Milestoned to WP 5.5.
- “Howdy fly-out menu”: Refine/replace the upper-right WP-Admin fly-out menu. Milestoned to WP 5.5. Needs someone to take the lead on this task.
- Uniform Search: Redesign of the search in WP-Admin. Milestoned to WP 5.6 as it will need a lot of work ahead of the release development cycle.
- WP-Admin Colors: Not milestoned for the moment.
Update on WP Accessibility Day
Quick update from @joedolson: It’s moving forward. Goal is to announce on March 25th; there’s a design in the works, so we’re on target. The website is currently under construction, thanks to @xkon. Regular meetings are hosted on #accessibility-events Slack 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 (requires registration).
Not much else to report right now. There is a budget mostly worked out, looking for sponsors to cover the captioning & transcription costs, etc.
Open floor
@joedolson: Ticket #49517 needs some discussion with the editor team, although it’s a very clear cut issue from the accessibility side.
@ellatrix is going to revert the related pull request on GitHub 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/.
