Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: April 1, 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, April 1, 17:00 UTC. @joesimpsonjr filled in for @ryokui for this meeting. 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 led by @sabernhardt, a welcome to new attendees with introductions, and rules for a family-friendly meeting.

Updates from working groups

  1. Report from Documentation Team@joedolson has been coordinating with @Hauwa Abashiya to follow up on the docs she brought last week, so those are progressing. For better clarity, I’m going to create a fully-realized demo of wp.a11y.speak() and place it in the wpaccessibility githubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repo. He also been working on getting an accessibility doc added to the 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 developer’s handbook. Accessibility Document can be found here. Practically, only the main page probably needs to be in the plugin handbook; the four sub sections might be good additions to our handbook;
  2. Additional Report from Documentation Team@sabernhardt provided more General Updates later:
  • WordPress 6.0 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 is April 12, with 20 tickets left in the 6.0 milestone.
  • Today’s bug scrub covered the 8 features and enhancements.
  • There are also 12 open bug tickets with the same deadline.
  • The Awaiting Review queue has 7 tickets, with only one opened since last week; and
  1. Report from 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/ Team@alexstine reported that Add screen reader instructions for navigating child blocks on block selection is currently blocked. @joedolson also asked for an update on #35483: Accessibility improvements for the Bulk Edit form

Open Floor

Our weekly meeting closed with this comment: @joesimpsonjr mentioned he is a Team Captain on the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US organizing team for this year’s event on September 9 through 11 in San Diego, California. It is in-person (if things continue to progress from a health perspective), but I wanted to invite anyone to participate:

#accessibility, #accessibility-docs, #meeting-notes