Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: September 3, 2021

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.

Updates from working groups

Only working groups that provided updates are shown below.

Documentation

The Test team wanted to know if there were any documented processes by the Accessibility team on how to properly test for accessibility issues/regressions. The idea here is to document the most common environments/setups used for testing by the Accessibility team. This way everyone will know how to check for accessibility issues. If anyone would like to assist in refining our documentation, please speak with @azhiyadev.

General

There hasn’t been much going on in General with preparations for WordPress 5.8.1. One ticket that did get fixed for this release is #53641: Can not configure image widget (and others) in widget accessability mode.

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/

• Gallery Block Refactor has some nice accessibility wins in the form of enabling each image in a gallery to have easy to add alt text now.
• 11.3 included the new Dimensions panel to start building out more options there for different blocks. This led to dimension controls being added for things like the featured imageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. 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..
• 11.4 included a change allowing for child blocks to absorb parent block controls. It needs testing and iteration, including trying it out in various blocks. There’s more discussion on how best to approach this here.
• The latest FSE Call for Testing led to a number of issues opened around the navigation block and improving accessibility. Recap to come asap.
• Gutenberg PR that could use some accessibility testing. Improve file block download button accessibility

Media

A change is coming in WordPress 5.8.1 which will adjust the number of media items that load after Load More button is selected. Other than that, just a few small odds and ends.

Themes

There is only one new theme awaiting review for the Accessibility Ready tag.

Open floor

Nothing for Open floor this week.