Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: April 23, 2021

About Us

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 shares accessibility expertise across the project to improve the accessibility of WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and resources.

WordPress targets WCAG 2.1 at level AA as the standard for development.

Learn More

For support related to WordPress & accessibility, visit the WordPress Accessibility forum.

You can also ask questions during Accessibility Team Office Hours every Wednesday at 14:00 UTC in the accessibility channel in 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/..

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.

Proposal to improve usage of keywords and labels on accessibility tickets, issues and pull requests

Add a new workflow to TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets. This will allow the accessibility team to skip a ticket if there is an in progress or not yet developed UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. from popping up in weekly bug scrubs. The proposal post was published on the Accessibility blog. Our request will be brought up in dev chat.

Updates from the working groups

Only the groups with updates to share are listed below.

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/

The following updates were provided by @annezazu for Gutenberg.

Check out the upcoming FSE Outreach Program schedule. TLDR: call for questions coming next week + the 6th call for testing is planned to be about template editing and the navigation 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. starting May 12th.
Read a detailed post sharing next steps after the first go/no go date. TLDR: various testing calls and refinements need to happen before 5.8’s feature freeze on May 25th.
Read the IE 11 Support Phase Out Plan. TLDR: officially removing IE11 support in WordPress 5.8.
A PR was merged to add focus on the save button in FSE but there’s some feedback indicating that this is a disruptive flow.

Documentation and Patterns

moved the A11YAccessibility 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) Pattern Library to its own document. The WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/. 2.1 Update doc was getting substantial.

Media

not much movement. Requesting opinions on removing infinite scroll.

General

Regarding general, today we still had a look at the Awaiting Review queue, next priorities are:

Assign an owner to all tickets in the 5.8 milestone.
Go through tickets milestoned for 5.8 and marked as enhancements and feature requests.

Open floor

It was suggested that the team make the accessibility team working groups more visible this way new contributors could find the list and know what each group’s responsibility is.

#meeting-notes