Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: August 21, 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.

Vote to change the day and time of the team’s weekly meeting

Following a first round of voting to change the day and time of the team’s weekly meeting and the tie between moving the meeting to Tuesday, and keeping it on Friday, the team decided to hold a second poll to break the tie. The vote was closed at 17:30 UTC during the meeting and the results were:

  • Tuesday, 15:00 UTC: 42.9% of votes;
  • Friday, 15:00 UTC: 57.1% of votes.

As such, the team’s choice is to keep the meeting on the current day and time. A review of such decision can take place again in the future, but possibily not before six months.

Call for Team’s goals for the 5.6 release

You can find more details about this point in a self-contained post to be published soon on the Make website.

Request for collaboration on 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/ and Full Site Editing

@annezazu reached out to the channel asking for collaboration from the Accessibility Team on two projects.

  • The Gutenberg Team is looking for more help with triage; documentation on triaging Gutenberg is available on 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/ and requests for joining the triage team can be done in the #core-editor channel on 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/..
  • The Full Site Editing outreach experiment is looking for accessibility focused representation before this initiative starts. More information can be found in the kickoff post about Full Site Editing outreach experiment on the Make website and people interested in participating can join the #fse-outreach-experiment channel on Slack.

Discussion about adding user-editable aria-labels to links in Gutenberg

The Team discussed an issue in the Gutenberg repository allowing users to add aria-labels to links. After a short discussion, the Team agreed that, while having multiple links and buttons with the same text can be harmful for users, using an aria-label attribute is almost surely not the best solution. @alexstine volunteered to sum up the Team’s position and to add a comment to the issue about aria-labels before closing it.

Discussion about communicating expanded/collapsed state in Gutenberg

Next, the team discussed another Gutenberg issue about the expanded/collapsed state of the “More options” button not being communicated to screen readers. Given that the bug was reported after testing on an iPod touch and while the team recognized that the screen reader expanded/collapsed state is not communicated in iOSiOS The operating system used on iPhones and iPads., after a short discussion the team decided to ask for more information to the reporter, given that the actual implementation works as expected. @nrqsnchz volunteered to write a comment on the issue about expanded/collapsed state.

Discussion about adding a screen reader announcement to the last Gutenberg 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. in a list

Finally, the issue with the proposal to add an announcement for screen readers when a user reaches the last Gutenberg block in a list was introduced. Given the little time left for discussion, but the great impact this improvement could have on the UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. for blind users, the Team decided to keep an eye on the issue and rediscuss it in the future.

#meeting-notes