Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: September 18, 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 Wednesday. This particular meeting was not held. See the full meeting schedule.

Updates from the working groups

NOTE: Only groups that provided updates are shown below.

Gutenberg Working Group: @annezazu for this ‘hefty’ share from 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/ working group:

• 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. bindings: UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. was merged to Allow only admin users to create and modify bindings by default, removing the prior experimental flag on this feature.
• Design: Advancing the WordPress Design System was shipped last week which is an important post to read, especially when thinking about phase 3, as the aim is to “bring together existing tools like wordpress/components, the new Figma library, and Storybook into a unified design system reference site that anyone can use to contribute back to WordPress or extend WordPress in line with a shared design language.”
• General interface: a PR is underway to move the Save/Publish buttons to the right of the Settings and Styles (pinned items) buttons as part of a broader effort to ensure the top toolbar shows the most important items in a clear order.
• Patterns: recent PR merged add opt out preference to the ‘Choose a Pattern’ modal when adding a page, resolving a point of feedback around the starter patterns.
• Styles: updated designs were shared on consider exposing the style book for classic themes with some early dev work around how to both address exposing the style book and iterating on the style book presentation.
• Zoom out: various PRs march forward progress on this feature for 6.7 including Double click block to exit zoom out mode and Add “Edit” button to Zoom Out mode toolbar to make it easier to enter and exit the mode along with vertical displacement when adding a pattern. Tied to this, the prior zoom out experiment was removed and a new up to date zoom out experiment was added. Finally, a dedicated zoom control in the editor header has been proposed.

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.