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.
Call for team rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts.
It has been nearly a year since @ryokuhi was nominated team rep. Because of this, he feels like the time has come to step down and give others the opportunity to run as candidates for the position. Following the meeting, a Call for Team Rep post will be published where you can add your name in to the running. Call for Team Rep nominations
Gather some answers for a survey regarding ATAG Part B in WordPress
Mike Gifford, a Drupal accessibility professional, wants to collect some feedback. ATAG comes in 2 parts. Part A is to make it accessible to authors with disabilities. Part B is to support authors in producing accessible content. There is a huge opportunity to make the web more accessible by providing better tools to authors. Funka gathered together CMS that were popular by governments in the European Union. There was an effort to bring together as many of the maintainers of these CMS as we could to discuss what could be done collectively to implement ATAG 2.0 Part B. You can see the main results here. Find the questions below.
Is ALT text required?
At this time, ALT text is encouraged in WordPress but not required. This may change in the future, but no immediate plans.
Ability to change languages in the editor?
Not supported at this time. @joedolson found the issue has been raised and will follow-up on it.
Can authors understand accessibility documentation? Does it make sense to content editors/publishers?
Documentation is below expectations at this point especially when it comes to publishing information about how to use Gutenberg 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/ with assistive technologies. It’s a work in progress for the team as a whole.
Are tables accessible by default or does the editor guide you to make an accessible table?
No, you must know what you are doing to create a structurally accessible table.
Does WordPress include an accessible forms creator?
Since there is no forms creator in WordPress core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., the answer is no. There are plugins that can add this functionality.
Can you upload videos with captions or transcripts? Are you able to add titles to IFrames?
Yes and yes. All of these are supported in WordPress core.
Is there any guidance to authors about creating accessible content in the editor?
There are a couple basic tools such as color contrast checking and heading order. This could be expanded in the future.
Any accessibility checking for uploaded documents such as PDFs?
No, nothing exists in core for that at the moment.
Does WordPress come with tools to help test the front-end of pages or the entire site?
No, nothing in core. There are some external services/plugins that can do this.
Would there be any interest in adding any of the above to core?
There may be some interest in the future, but at this point, it is not likely to happen.
Is there increased interest from authors for creating accessible content?
Absolutely.
What is happening to support authors who want to create accessible content?
Find the WordPress ATag statement here.
Is there increased interest to make the editor accessible to people with disabilities?
Probably not as much as the Accessibility team would wish.
What is WordPress doing to make the editors more accessible to people with disabilities?
That is one of our teams biggest goals. Progress takes time.
Has WordPress ever been in collaboration with other authoring tools?
Not with the Accessibility team, but the Security team works with others to ensure WordPress stays as safe as possible. It is also possible that other teams do as well.
Find the beginning of the conversation in the accessibility channel on 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/..
Open floor
Last week, a post about moving to WCAG 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 was published but now it has been covered up by other posts on the blog. The proposal is to pin the post at the top for a couple months.
@annezazu reports:
I just wanted to mention List View as something that would be great to get accessibility feedback around as it’s coming to 5.8 in the Post Editor + Template Editor and will be an important tool leading into whatever the Site Editor experience is like. You can read about the feature here and see what improvements are planned here.
