Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: May 29, 2020

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.

Prototype: move blocks between levels with keyboard

The team discussed this 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/ PR that explores adding the ability to move blocks in and out of nesting levels with keyboard only.

We agreed that is is a very welcoming and promising exploration. There was a particular interest in figuring out what would be the best way to communicate these position changes to screen readers.

Accessibility audit of the new auto-update feature for plugins and themes

We discussed the recently merged auto-updates feature for plugins and themes from an accessibility perspective. There was discussion about how links that act like buttons should be handled, clarity of announcements, hiding icons, and button labels that change.

@ryokuhi had the excellent idea of bringing some of these issues to next week’s WCEU 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/..

Please refer to the Slack discussion for a more detailed overview.

Documentation of Gutenberg’s accessibility features

We discussed how to better inform users of the various accessibility features that are present on the blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. editor. The idea of creating documentation and adding a link to it, such as “Accessibility Help” was well received.

We agreed to bring back this topic on next week’s meeting and look at all the different accessibility features and options that would be useful to have documented.

#meeting-notes