Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: July 17, 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.

Removal of aria-labels for links opening in new tabs

We discussed this Gutenberg PR that removed the aria-label property from links set to open in a new tab. It was previously suggested by the team to remove since the old implementation was doing more harm than good.

That said, a proper solution has yet to be implemented and we’d like to discuss all the alternatives with the relevant teams.

@ryokuhi volunteered to create a TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket so we can follow up and start the conversation.

Create “Accessibility Statement” tool with features equivalent to Privacy Policy Tools

We also looked at this Trac ticket that proposes to mimic the tools already in place for creating Privacy Policy pages, but for Accessibility statements.

We discussed the pros and cons of such a tool and agreed that if done well, it can be a great medium to help spread accessibility awareness and education.

@sarahricker volunteered to summarize our discussion and add a comment to the ticket.

Initial implementation of <details>
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.

We then 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 looks to add a <details> block and agreed that we should follow the ARIA Authoring Practices implementation for an accordion component instead.

We added our feedback to the parent issue the PR is linked to.

#meeting-notes-2