These are the weekly notes for the Accessibility 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 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 the meeting’s agenda here.
Updates from the working groups
Only groups that provided updates are shown below.
General
@ryokuhi reported that there are no tickets in need of special input from the team. During bug scrubs, the team is focusing on tickets milestoned for the next incumbent releases (6.0.4, 6.1, and 6.1.1) and on tickets Awaiting Review, to keep the queue under control. There are already 11 tickets milestoned for 6.2, which the team will start reviewing in the next few weeks.
By the time WordPress 6.1 will be released, 30 core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. tickets with the accessibility focus will have been fixed. @annezazu summarized in a post on the Make Core blog all accessibility improvements in WordPress 6.1.
Gutenberg 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/
@annezazu shared for awareness a Pull Request to introduce a Browse Mode in the site editor.
@alexstine asked for some testing and feedback on the Pull Request to modify the shortcut which focuses the list view and on the Pull Request to improve region navigation. These are related to the Pull request to imporve regions and shortcuts in the editor.
Media
@joedolson slated two tickets from the WP Campus Gutenberg report for WordPress 6.2: one is about insufficient form semantics and the other is about insufficient labelling and inappropriate nesting of form controls. These tickets, together with the one about text inadvertently rendered by assistive technologies, will be all tackled as a group.
Meta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.
@joedolson shared that HelpHub, the part of the wordpress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ website which includes end-user documentation, is undergoing a redesign. It’s going to follow the same patterns used for other redesign, but it should get some accessibility attention in the near future. For more details, there’s a post about HelpHub redesign in the Make Documentation blog.
Open floor
@joedolson reminded about WordPress Accessibility Day, happening on November 2-3, 2022. Registration is open (at the time of the meeting, more than 500 people had already done it), sharing on social media is appreciated (the website is wpaccessibility.day), and volunteers are still needed, especially for the post-event video-editing work (please reach out to Isla Waite in the WordPress Accessibility Day Slack instance).
If you’ve been a (more or less) regular contributor to the Accessibility Team in the past year, please send a Direct Message to @joedolson, who will add the appropriate Accessibility Team member or contributor badge to your WordPress profile.
@joesimpsonjr shared the page with the newly added venue accessibility checklist page in the WordCamp 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. Organizer Handbook, to tackle a few accessibility issues that impacted on the experience of a few participants during WordCamp US 2022.
