Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: June 16, 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.

All Team Updates

• Media: @joedolson committed the redesign of the admin image editor earlier this week.

• General: He has punted a number of tickets to 6.4, but have a significant handful that are ready or nearly-ready to commit.

• Themes: At WCEU, Joe talked to Maja Benke about taking on the task of reviewing themes for accessibility-ready tags, so she’s going to start getting trained in on that task and will interface with the theme review team to help on that. This is important since the theme review team is low on accessibility knowledge right now.

• 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/: The site editor needs testing; we’re moving in very close to the end of the cycle, and there are a lot of new features that need some attention. Please install Gutenberg and play with all the new features. Particularly look for any focus losses, controls that aren’t working from the keyboard, or focus moves that should happen and don’t (e.g., opening a modal then not being placed inside it).

• @sabernhardt shared the following 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. team update: Please review the pull request on 4730.

• @alexstine shared this update for comment: https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins/issues/405 and for async review: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/51126#issuecomment-1594825674

Open Floor

• WCEU 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) Team Onboarding — At contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. at WCEU, the team onboarded a few additional people to review 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. output & Maja Benke wrote up a draft of a document for us to post to help people know the process they should follow when testing block output. Will document soon.

• Is it possible to change our meeting time? — Also, Maja Benke requested that we once again consider changing our meeting time – she would like to attend, but our current time is not good for her. And, honestly, our current time isn’t really good for anybody in Europe – Friday evening is just not a great time for people to attend a meeting. We should give this serious thought. Other team members, like @poena, are also routinely unable to attend. Because we have members in the US Pacific time zone, we can’t move a lot earlier reasonably, but we could change to a different day, so that European attendees aren’t having to start off their weekend with a voluntary meeting…

NOTE: If you’d like to have a topic added to the agenda for our next meeting, please mention it in the comments of upcoming agenda.