Rian Rietveld 7:13 am on August 29, 2025
Tags: , ,   

Update project WP A11y Docs August 2025

How’s the work going on the documentation for WordPress about 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) (WP 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) Docs).

This update informs you about:

  • the brainstorm session about the content;
  • new contributors that joined in;
  • the work planned for September 2025;
  • how you can help.

Note: The new website for the Knowledge Base is stil in its set up phase: content needs to be added, accessibility issues need to be fixed. So we will not publish the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org here yet, but if you want to see the progress, please visit the GitHub repo wp-a11y-docs and follow the link mentioned there.

Brainstorm session about the content

Paul van Buuren, Annelies Verhelst, Wendie Huis in't Veld , Savi Sinnema, Caitlin de Rooij, Johan Huijkman and Rian Rietveld proudly standing before a wall of post-its.

In our previous update we shared the plans for the setup of the Knowledge Base. In Phase 1 we are going to gather all information about accessibility for people that use or build for WordPress and add that to website.

But how to organise that the best way? With a group of seven people, involved in WordPress and/or accessibility, we brainstormed about this for an afternoon. Resulting in a wall full of Post-its.

Thank you Paul van Buuren (@paulvanbuuren), Annelies Verhelst (@anneliesjenl), Wendie Huis in’t Veld (@dolgelukkig), Savi Sinnema, Caitlin de Rooij and Johan Huijkman!

The main conclusions where:

  • There needs to be a section about how to start, where to begin if you are new to accessibility and have no clue where to start.
  • To help users get to the knowledge they need, a reading guide is necessary. Per target group about what they need to read and where to find it. Content must be published once, but the way to get there can differ.
  • How to test was the most requested topic in the survey “Which WP accessibility documentation do you need”. There must be dedicated menu item with how to and checklists.
  • Each of the “Topics” with a “Standards and best practice” menu item will also have a “how to test” section.
  • The point of this Knowledge base is not to rewrite all the content there is out there but to write down what’s important in this context and link to reliable resources.

You can find the full report of the brainstorm session in the Google Doc: Brainstorm session WP A11y Docs.

New contributors join in

Kudos to Yoren Chang (@yoren) for making it possible to preview pull requests for the website in GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ pages. Annelies Verhelst is helping with content reviews. Gary Jones (@garyj) set up the rights for the wp-a11y-docs repo and helps with pull requests. The NL Design System gave permission to translate Dutch content into English and publish it on the Knowledge Base.

Work planned for September 2025

  • Copy all accessibility information from the current handbook to the new website.
  • Move the info that needs to stay in the current handbook to a repo on the WordPress account and publish the handbook from there.
  • Work on extending the content in the Knowledge Base.
  • Fix the accessibility issues on the website.

You can follow the work in our GitHub Project board.

How you can help

There are several ways you can help this project:

  • Pick an issue from the Todo column and work on it. Please comment with the issue that you want to do this work.
  • Review a pull request from the PRs in review column . With the description of the pull request there is always a link to a preview, so you don’t have to dig into the code. Add your review as a comment with the pull request.
  • Sponsor Rian’s time and expenses, at the moment 25% of her time is sponsored.
  • Read through the content that is already published and let us know what you think.
  • Follow the accessibility-docs SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel on wordpress.slack.com.

#accessibility, #make-wordpress-org-updates, #wp-a11y-docs