Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: October 22, 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.

Design

@chaion07 highlighted these two proposals that might be worth looking in to.

General

  • Today, there was a brief pause on tickets milestoned for 5.9 due to the reviewing of the Awaiting Review queue. It may be worth having an extra bug scrub considering we’re quickly approaching the release deadlines. There will be an extra bug scrub on Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 16:00 UTC.
  • Currently, there is also not an Accessibility Release Coordinator for 5.9. See the related Slack message here. Please message @audrasjb if you would like to volunteer or have further questions about the role. @alexstine offered to take this role if one other person would assist.

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/

Media

  • @priethor left a comment regarding infinite scroll in the Media Library. Our current plan is to discuss this during next weeks Accessibility meeting.
  • @madtownlems is currently working on a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party that may improve accessibility of existing images without Alt Text. The plugin is not yet publicly available, but we’ll let everyone know when it is ready for testing. @sabernhardt shared the following TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket, containing some background about reusing Alt Text: improve the user interface to ensure correct usage of the image alt text.

Themes

While there were no updates from the Themes group today, it is likely time to start allocating some focus to the new Twenty Twenty-Two theme. This Twenty Twenty-Two GitHub Issue is currently tracking accessibility.

Open floor

Just a reminder to vote on which meeting time will work best for you. The poll will remain open until Friday, October 29, 2021 16:30 UTC.

#meeting-notes