On Wednesday, September 03, 2025 at 15:00 UTC, team meeting started in #accessibility facilitated by @krupajnanda. You can read the full transcript or see the meeting agenda.
New Team Reps
@krupajnanda and @thisisyeasin are selected as Accessibility 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 Reps, and @muddassirnasim joined the team to contribute and gain experience in the role.
Accessibility Team Meeting Schedule
The team discussed finding the best meeting time that works across different groups, with @joedolson and the other team reps working to propose options for a vote. The new meeting time is to be announced soon!
Updates from working groups
Design
- @joedolson shared that the design working group’s main focus is the admin redesign, which is a large and complex project that’s difficult to track. He emphasised the importance of reviewing new interfaces for accessibility since current work is mostly limited to design proposals. He also pointed out that specific areas, such as Block 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. Commenting, need more design attention and shared a related GitHub issue for reference.
Documentation
- @rianrietveld and @joedolson are working on new Accessibility documentation, which can be followed on the make/accessibility blog with the hashtag #wp-a11y-docs. They are getting more contributors to help with this effort.
General
- @joedolson reported on progress with core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. tickets, noting that 28 tickets were assigned to the 6.9 milestone, 7 were punted due to inactivity, and 18 have been committed. He also introduced a large patch on #40428 ticket related to hiding CSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site.-generated content from assistive technologies and requested testing support.
- Joe shared that he audited the WordPress admin for CSS-generated content issues, made changes to ensure dashicons selectors use generated empty alternatives, and emphasised the need to verify there are no visual differences in updated code. @krupajnanda suggested a potential “call for testing” post and requested instructions on how to test, to which Joe confirmed he would prepare guidance.
Gutenberg Team
- @joedolson shared that the Gutenberg 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/ items and the implementation of the Lightbox in Galleries are the most relevant things that need testing.
Media
- @joedolson mentioned he had a discussion point but preferred to defer it to the next meeting due to time constraints. He requested adding “Discuss integration of media metadata sourced alt text” to the next meeting’s agenda.
Meta
- No updates were reported.
Themes
- @joedolson reported that work is still ongoing to complete the accessibility-ready themes documentation, with Amber Hinds set to follow up on that.
Open Floor
- Nothing major was discussed during the open floor.
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.
Thank you, @muddassirnasim, for the pre-publish review.
#accessibility, #meeting-notes
