joesimpsonjr 10:29 pm on July 21, 2024  

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: July 19, 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:

Documentation Working Group:

  • Joe also mentioned that @Amber Hinds and the contributors at WCEH spent some time on theme accessibility-ready documentation.

General Working Group:

  • WordPress 6.6 is released. Also, bug scrubs have been continuing; I’ve now got about 30 tickets milestoned for 6.7, so Joe will be getting started on those soon. @afercia has been getting a number of tasks done in 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/, as well.

Gutenberg Working Group:

  • @joedolson ran the bug scrub this week on Gutenberg issues, and @jeryj made a PR for one of the open issues that we wanted to have available to test conceptually. Here: is the link to the Github PR. This automatically opens the 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. panel for 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. settings when a block is selected. Currently, the block sidebar stays in whatever mode you’ve selected, which requires you to switch modes if you want to configure blocks. This PR would change that so that the block sidebar auto-switches to be active when you select a block. We want to test this to see whether it makes an easier flow; it might be an improvement, but we’re not really sure. I’m going to try and set up a test environment that can be shared so that I can ask some people to try it out. When I (Joe) do, I’ll post on Make WordPress Accessible.

Themes Working Group:

Work is starting on Twenty Twenty Five, so that’s the biggest new thing. But the progress on the accessibility-ready tag is also moving forward; continuing work as I mentioned earlier, but also some tickets with movement to add information about the accessibility-ready tag in user facing environments in the theme directory.

These two items would really help in letting people know what exactly the accessibility-ready tag means.

Media Working Group:

  • @antpb is working on experimentation for the next generation media library; we discussed it on Wednesday. Nothing else to report there. It’s still in very early stages, but we talked about some long-term goals that we want to think about, so that the media library can be built in a way that would support those features. Things like an in-browser captioning environment, etc.

Meta Working Group: 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. is giving feedback to @elblakeo31, who is getting his process refined, on the following update:

Also, FYI- Looks like there’s a comment on the Alt issue here: https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-main-2022/issues/462#issuecomment-2214176587.

The hardest part is the timing; the scans of the old design are mostly being ignored, because (rightly) they’re going to be redesigned soon.

Open Floor:

@joesimpsonjr will follow up with @nhrob and @rcreators regarding expressed interest in assuming the Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. roles and asked Joe for thoughts on procedure and preparing for a vote to make it official. He suggested posting a post for a Call for Team Reps, documenting what is seen as responsibilities to pass on as well. You can use this as a reference https://make.wordpress.org/updates/team-reps/.

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.