Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: October 8, 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.

Discussion around meeting time as Daylight Saving Time will be changing soon

Most of the contributors in today’s meeting agreed the time could remain the same, but a poll was created to ensure all voices are heard. Take the poll here.

Updates for the working groups

Given the limited time, only @azhiyadev from the Documentation group asked a question about which themes should be referenced in the team’s handbook (in general, the current default theme at the time of writing). She also reported about an audit tool under development by the Training and Docs Teams to capture the version number of WordPress referenced in documentation.

Open floor

@azhiyadev asked what is needed to improve the accessibility of animated gifs and videos without audio. A few suggestions were given, here is a short summary.

• For videos without audio, captions make no sense, as they are only the transcription of the spoken text of the video. Nevertheless, descriptive transcripts can be useful: they include a text description of the visual information needed to understand the content and are essential if the video is not purely decorative and if part of the content is not available in text form. This is also required by Success Criterion 1.2.1 of WCAG 2.1.
• Don’t use autoplay on videos.
• Allow users to pause a gif; an example on how to do this is available in an article on CSS-Tricks.
• Maybe, show a static image instead of the gif if the user has activated the prefers-reduced-motion preference.
• Make sure there are no flashing lights.