joesimpsonjr 10:13 pm on March 12, 2023  

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: March 3, 2023

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 here.

Updates from the working groups

Only groups that provided updates are shown below.

General Team

@ryokuhi provided the following update:

  • There are 11 tickets in the Awaiting Review queue, with only one unreviewed (probably a good candidate for closing, as it’s too generic).
  • There are 5 open tickets in the 6.2 Milestone (3 which require coordination with 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/, and 2 about the About Page and the dashboard banner for 6.2). 15 accessibility tickets have been committed so far in the next major releaseMajor Release A set of releases or versions having the same major version number may be collectively referred to as “X.Y” -- for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, and all other versions in the 5.2. (five dot two dot) branch of that software. Major Releases often are the introduction of new major features and functionality..
  • There are already 12 tickets milestoned for 6.3, which we’ll start reviewing beginning next week..

Gutenberg Team (@annezazu with comments from @poena)

Mainly want to flag a few issues/PRs related to accessibility! In other news, I’m also working on a draft of improvements for 6.2 with @alexstine and @joedolson

  • https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/42373
  • https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/48054
  • https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/48204
  • https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/47241 @poena, this wasn’t labeled for a11yAccessibility 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) but seems to be. Added the label but lmk if that was incorrect.
  • https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/47898
  • https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/48015

47241 was… "Overwritten" either when the navigation blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. menu was added to the browse mode sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme., or when the edit button was removed, or when the save button was added, without replacement headings. I have not been able to keep up… Its all very discouraging. I guess maybe someone saw it as pointless because the H1 ticket has not been resolved. Stefano mentioned that the last for items have been closed.

Media and MetaMeta 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 (as per Stefano) reports that we’ll start planning how to handle 6.3 tickets in the next few bug scrubs.

Open floor

@joedolson talked a bit about plans for 6.3:

One thing we need to prioritize in the next cycle is polishing the editor experience. It has a lot of technical accessibility – e.g., things that are possible to do, but it’s seriously lacking in usability with AT. We should put a lot of attention into trying to clean that up.

There are two areas I’d like to focus on:

  1. finishing off outstanding accessibility tickets. There are a lot of open issues, and I’d like to put pressure on those.
  2. Polishing the output of some of the sketchier blocks, e.g. tables.

If we, as a team, put more focus on the editor, I think we can make better progress. We just need to spend a cycle where it’s our primary focus, rather than something we get to ad the end of some bug scrubs.

Read the full discussion in the Open Floor section of the meeting’s transcript.