Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: January 5, 2024

These are the bi-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 or see the full meeting schedule.

Updates from the working groups

NOTE: Only groups that provided updates are shown below.

Team Updates

Design Working Group:

• @joedolson shared: Probably the biggest design change in the last couple weeks is the launch of the new Developer Resources design: https://developer.wordpress.org. It could use a little accessibility attention, though it’s not super complicated, and there aren’t a lot of problems. Something I noticed right away is duplicate ‘View all’ links on https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/; those need to be differentiated, but mostly it just needs some people to go over it and check for things like that.

General Working Group:

• @joedolson shared For general, it’s mostly about rebooting the bug scrubs; which is a topic for later in the meeting. The main goal in General in the next few weeks is to try and get some patches and testing done in preparation for 6.5; currently the 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. is expected on Feb. 13th, so it’s a very short amount of time left.

Gutenberg Working Group:

• @annezazu shared the following update for the 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: Update for you all, including the items for the broader CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. meeting. Feel free to take or leave :slightly_smiling_face:

FYIs:

• High priority labeled items for the Gutenberg repo has been triaged with an open convo around whether to add the label to 6.5 priority items to help improve project organization and communication.
• New overview issue: Pattern / Template Part Unification – the technical challenges.

6.5 related updates:

• Data Views: check out an early prototype of inline editing to explore what will be needed for a future APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., add list layout to templates PR merged, align filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. implementations PR merged, new issue for show total count in menu item, and new issue for implement Kanban layout.
• Font Library: add global configuration variables for font directory, which enables the option to set a custom directory as font directory. Interactivity API: check out on experiment with Comments 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.: client-side form submission. Design tools: early draft PR to add backgroundSize feature with implicit repeating backgrounds to add more functionality to the Group block’s background image support that was added in 6.4.
• Command Palette: please share feedback around whether it would be helpful to enable the command palette feature everywhere in WordPress.
• Navigation: Check out the latest prototype for being able to customize the navigation overlay with a template part, enabling a separate menu experience for mobile.
• Performance: loads of recent performance improvements particularly from ellatrix (too many to link to) with more to come that should greatly improve both the post and site editor experience. Please share feedback as these fixes and enhancements land!
• RevisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision.: the PR to integrate style book is close to landing and the PR to show change summary on selected item landed for GB 17.3.
• Pattern overrides (new working name for the previous partial sync patterns): the UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. of the experience is being established and refined with the PR to edit source pattern in focus mode in post editor.
• Work continues to align page editing features in Site and Post Editor with the latest update here.
• HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. API: Backport updates from Core and HTML API: Add support for H1-H6 elements in the HTML Processor.

Accessibility additions:

• [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)] Fix: Use spans instead of headings on dataviews table view page title
• [a11y] Apply focus style to revision items
• Reconsider the ‘Accessibility’ section in the Preferences modal dialog discussion.

Media:

• Joe reported that the Media team is making plans to coordinate a meeting to discuss the media library redesign. Figuring out the timeframe and goals for that remain a top priority, since it’s going to make a big difference to how we approach existing issues. We’ve got a draft proposal to have a meeting, but no specific date yet.

Open Floor for Discussion:

• For the next meeting:

1. Talk about scheduling a special meeting for discussing the accessibility vision for WordPress; and
2. Changing the bug scrub (possibly 10am CT on Tuesdays).

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