Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: September 17, 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.

Improvements to the 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/ contrast checker

Following a suggestion made in a comment to the meeting agenda, the team discussed possible improvements to the 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. Editor notification shown when the contrast between a text and its background is too low. The full discussion can be found in the 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/. channel, following are the main takeaways.

• Marking the combination with low contrast as an explicit accessibility concern will help people understand the reason why they should take action.
• On the other side, it’s also possible that content creators not interested in meeting the needs of people with disabilities would just ignore the issue altogether, instead of considering it.
• Adding a link to a trusted resource might be a nice way to educate users about color contrast. This is already in place in other parts of the WordPress interface: in the media library, for example, there’s a link to the Alt decision tree right below the Alternative text input field.

The Team agreed to continue discussion about the topic by opening a related issue in the Gutenberg repository.

Updates from the working groups

Given the lack of time, the point is postponed to next weekly meeting.

Open floor

Nothing for open floor this week.