Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: March 18, 2022

These are the notes for the Make WordPress 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 occurred Friday, March 18, 17:00 UTC. You can read the entire meeting transcript on our 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 and view the Meeting Agenda here. The meeting begins on time at the conclusion of the bug scrub, a welcome to new attendees with introductions, and rules for a family-friendly meeting.

Updates from working groups

1. Report from Design Team — @ryokuhi is testing the change from the hash to the link icon in documentation, which is an improvement;
2. Report from Documentation Team — There are two code snippets for @joedolson for review that @Hauwa Abashiya posted in the #accessibility-docs channel; and
3. Report from General Team — The team is still keeping the awaiting review queue under control; There is one ticket milestoned for the 5.9.3 (the one about the accessibility-ready label for Twenty Twenty-Two); There are 7 tickets milestoned for 6.0 and marked as enhancements or feature request; and There are 17 tickets milestoned for 6.0 and marked as enhancements or feature request; Also, the feature freeze deadline was cancelled, so there’s no more need to differentiate between type of tickets. Finally, BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 will be on 12 April, which leaves this team one extra week to work on tickets in this milestone.
4. Report from Gutenberg Team — This team landed several big accessibility improvements to 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/ as described by @alexstine:

These updates ensure there will not be any regressions for list view in the future.

• https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/39302
• https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/39265

List view improvements:

• https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/38639
• https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/38679

Best of all, this adds much better support for blocks without the contenteditable attribute. Still a lot of work to do but heading in right direction.

• https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37934

5. Report from Themes Team — @joedolson reported that there has been a fair amount of movement on https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/39266, with the goal to create a mechanism for viewing & testing the output of blocks. A couple of PRs already available with ideas, plus another tool that could be incorporated into core to generate the data. This development is promising that they will be reaching the point where we can do proper testing of all of that output in a solid, reusable model. This is a very important step for serious auditing of block output and open a pathway for FSE theme to be considered accessibility-ready.

Open Floor

Our weekly meeting closed with this comment:

• @ryokuhi won’t be able to attend the April 1 and possibly the April 15 meetings and @alexstine and @joesimpsonjr will fill in. Thanks for the huge amount of work accomplished and to everyone for attending.