Nazmul Hasan Robin 11:32 am on November 1, 2024
Tags: ,   

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: Nov 06, 2024

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly 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 on Wednesday, November 06, 2024, 15:00 UTC.

Updates from working groups

  • Design
  • Documentation
  • General
  • 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/
  • Media
  • 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.
  • Themes

New Time for Accessibility Office Hours Meeting

Twenty Twenty-Five Theme Accessibility Testing

Open floor

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug scrub has moved to Tuesdays, 16:00 UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#accessibility, #agenda

Joe Dolson 3:37 pm on October 14, 2024  

Next Steps for the Accessibility Team

Following discussion with @nhrrob, one of our current team representatives, he has determined that he is still able to participate. The complications surrounding the vagueness of the login gatekeeping are still present; but he has concluded for himself that he is comfortable logging in. If this changes, we will once again suspend 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) meetings. Since there has been no guidance given regarding the definition of “affiliation” with WP Engine, this will continue to be an individual choice that may change in an ongoing manner.

This leaves us with one active team representative and one inactive team representative. We all continue to have the same overarching motivation: making WordPress more accessible.

With only one available team representative, we will be temporarily reducing to one meeting per month. The next team meeting will take place on November 6th.

Historically, getting anybody willing to be the team representative has been a hard challenge. We’re all busy doing the daily work of improving accessibility, and it’s hard to find people who are willing to coordinate meetings. The willingness of @rcreators and @nhrrob to take on this management task is greatly appreciated.

Feel free to comment on this post with your opinions on this path. Please restrict your comments to productive ideas about ways to move forward and make WordPress more accessible.

Joe Dolson 8:04 pm on October 12, 2024  

Accessibility Team Meetings Suspended

As neither of the current 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 representatives are able to log-in to WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, team meetings are suspended until further notice. Bug scrubs will continue to run as normal.

Rishi Mehta 7:07 am on September 26, 2024
Tags: ,   

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: Oct 02, 2024

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly 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 on Wednesday, October 02, 2024, 15:00 UTC.

Updates from working groups

  • Design
  • Documentation
  • General
  • 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/
  • Media
  • 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.
  • Themes

New Time for Accessibility Office Hours Meeting

Twenty Twenty-Five Theme Accessibility Testing

Open floor

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug scrub has moved to Tuesdays, 16:00 UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#accessibility, #agenda

joesimpsonjr 3:25 pm on July 24, 2024
Tags:   

Call for Accessibility Team Representatives

The Make WordPress Accessible team is in need of two Team Reps to assume this role. With @alexstine stepping away in June and @joesimpsonjr at the end of August after almost three years in this role, we are making a Call for 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 Reps.

What is a 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.?

Ideally, all Make WordPress teams should have two representatives which allows them to share responsibilities, divide tasks, and cover each other when needed.

Team Reps work with other teams across the project, share key updates across all contributor teams, and generally help to support the team as a whole.

  • Team Rep is an organizational role that is mostly administrative in nature; it is not a Lead role.
  • Letting go of the Team Rep title is not a loss of status, just a handing off of responsibilities.
  • Someone who is a leader in a team can lead whether they are doing the team rep job or not.

What to Expect in the Role?

Expectations vary from team to team, but here are some of what to expect:

  • Prepare meeting agenda by requesting updates from Accessibility working groups;
  • Conduct the team’s bi-weekly meetings on the Make Accessibility 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; and
  • Document meeting notes and share updates with other teams as necessary

This would be a great opportunity to move the Meeting time to accommodate other time zones around the world, continue increasing participation and incorporate new voices.

Additional information, including orientation topics including the title, responsibilities, team site, current team reps, and your official role can be found on the Team Updates – https://make.wordpress.org/updates/team-reps/ page.

What are our Next Steps?

Are YOU interested in contributing? Just provide a name in the comments section of this post and plan on joining us at our Friday, August 2, 2024 Meeting at 16:00 UTC.

If you would like to be considered for the role or know someone who would be a great fit, you have the opportunity to nominate yourself or others by adding a comment to this post. Remember that, if someone nominates you, but you don’t feel like accepting, you should feel more than free to say no: your nomination be considered only if you explicitly agree.

#team-reps

Amber Hinds 3:13 pm on June 13, 2024
Tags:   

WordCamp Europe 2024 Contributor Day Summary

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 had a great turnout for Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe, including 14 people who were new to the accessibility team. Thank you to everyone who participated!

@joedolson and @alh0319 led two tables, focusing on accessibility testing themes that had requested the Accessibility Ready tag and addressing open accessibility tickets in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and 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/.

During the day, contributors accomplished the following…

Accessibility-Ready Theme Review

Several contributors reviewed all four themes that had requested the accessibility-ready tag. They provided feedback to theme developers about elements that need to be fixed before the themes can be approved for the tag.

@rianrietveld started reviewing the current accessibility-ready requirements and is putting together a doc with suggested updates and possible new items to include. The current accessibility-ready requirements are many years old and outdated. This doc is a work in progress, but the idea is to update the accessibility-ready tag requirements so themes with it will provide a better starting point to align with current best practices and accessibility standards.

@alh0319 is building a tool to walk contributors and developers through testing themes for the accessibility-ready tag. The idea for this tool is to make it easier for anyone to determine if a theme meets the accessibility-ready requirements and to generate reports that can be easily posted in TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. when the tag is requested.

We’ve also opened an issue to update the accessibility theme unit test data to better support accessibility testing of 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.-based and full site editing themes.

Core Tickets Worked On

Contributors worked on testing issues that have been reported and reviewing patches for tickets. The following tickets were worked on:

Committed: #40331

Thank You to Contributors

Thank you to all the contributors who helped in-person in Italy and virtually via 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/.! Here are some of the people who contributed:

Please leave a comment if we missed you, and I will add you to the list of contributors.

#accessibility-ready

joesimpsonjr 7:03 pm on February 16, 2024
Tags: , ,   

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: February 16, 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

Documentaton Working Group:

General Working Group:

  • @joedolson shared that 6.5 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 out and in testing, so please take a look! There are still some important bug fixes in hoping to get in.

Gutenberg Working Group:

@annezazu shared this update 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:

Outside of the chaos and joy of 6.5, some quick items to note for you all:

Also want to flag up whether anyone is game to write a recap of accessibility improvements for 6.5.

Open Floor for Discussion:

  • Joe asked for more feedback on the Accessibility Vision Document;
  • @joesimpsonjr asks due to attending WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Asia (in transit March 1), should we cancel our next regularly scheduled meeting?
  • Joe Jr also shared a message from @bethannon1: I’m reaching out to see if you think there might be interest in exploring the idea of having an accessibility-specific “happiness table” at WCUS – potentially alongside the more generic happiness table. Even if it was only for one morning or one afternoon, it might be a great way to raise awareness about accessibility. One morning or afternoon could be staffed by 4 to 6 people. One whole day might require 10 to 12 people. With my existing commitments around the event I don’t think I would be able to help staff it – but we could plan for Meg Miller from our team to help. Maybe there would be a handful of other folks from the accessibility team that might be interested?

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.

#accessibility-ready, #design, #website-redesign

Andrea Fercia 12:34 pm on September 13, 2023
Tags: ,   

Accessibility Office Hours

In an effort to improve 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) knowledge in the WordPress project, the accessibility team will hold Office Hours every Wednesday at 14:00 UTC, starting on September 20th.

The purpose of this initiative is to provide a dedicated space and time to discuss accessibility principles and best practices.

When

The first accessibility office hours will be Wednesday, September 20, 2023 at 14:00 UTC in the #accessibility Slack channel.

Why

It’s difficult to find opportunities to discuss general accessibility principles and best practices in depth. Accessibility team meetings mainly focus on issues that emerge during the release cycle and bug scrubs focus on specific TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets or 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/ issues.

The accessibility office hours is not a space to discuss specific issues. Instead, it’s meant to be a learning opportunity for everyone. It’s a space where everyone can help everyone improve their accessibility knowledge.

Though this is a meeting focused on accessibility, everyone is welcome, so please drop in and say hello if you have time! Feel free to contribute discussion points and leave them in the comments on this post.

Office hours as a 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. project

In the accessibility team there’s not much prior experience about the best way to hold this kind of meeting. This is an opportunity to get participants involved in setting the best way to structure these sessions. All are welcome to join and propose ways we can organize topics to prioritize them in the most efficient way.

All participants contribution will also be key to discuss whether and how to collect the outcome of the meetings discussions in a series of documented, shared, best practices.

What if I can’t make it?

Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC may not fit with everyone’s spare time or time zone. Depending on the requests and number of participants, the accessibility team is open to running a second office hours session on a different day and at a later time. Please do feel free to let us know what would work for you in the comments.

#a11y, #meeting

Joe Dolson 3:00 pm on August 7, 2023  

Matrix Test Results

In 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) chat for Friday, August 4th, the team ran the entire meeting within Matrix, using a variety of different clients, to assess the current state of the environment for users with disabilities. If you’re not already familiar with Matrix, it’s an open-source federated chat platform that is being evaluated as a possible replacement for 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/..

Right now, it is possible to use Matrix or Slack clients to interact in a Slack meeting, so while we held our meeting using Matrix, it was recorded in the Slack accessibility channel. Review the conversation in Slack.

As long as we can use both clients to interact, there are no significant concerns. However, we need to set accessibility criteria that the Matrix experience needs to meet before it’s feasible for the project to migrate solely to that platform. (Other teams may have other criteria, of course.)

Summary

Overall, Matrix was marginally usable for screen reader users and keyboard navigation. Most buttons were labeled and possible to interact with, and it was possible for screen reader users to post messages, read messages, and change channels. (Or rooms, in Matrix terminology.)

However, there were significant barriers to usability that would make the experience slow and frustrating for both these groups of users. As a productivity tool, it would significantly decrease the productivity and participation rate of users with disabilities.

Issues Noted

Please note that this was not a formal testing scenario, and should not be considered complete. This was a live interactive session in which we explored the environment trying to discover as much as we could in a short time.

  1. @alexstine (NVDA, Windows, Chrome, expert screen reader user) So far, I’m finding the web version of Element not verbose at all, causing me to really explore the page to get anything useful.

    Issue: Using a screen reader, the application didn’t provide much in the way of orienting tools that Alex could use to efficiently locate key functions and information.

  2. @Travel_Girl (Maja Benke) (Element web app, Firefox, Dark Mode, prefers reduced motion) I find it hard with keyboard to use it, but I’m not a native keyboard user.

    Issue: Two fundamental issues here. First, the keyboard shortcuts are difficult to locate. Second, the keyboard shortcuts are inadequate, and don’t provide tools for moving between application regions or navigating messages.

  3. @alexstine Landmarks are lacking and I can’t figure out how to predictably access the message list.

    Issue: As above, this is a lack of orienting tools and navigation mechanisms for reading messages.

  4. @alexstine Can you find a keyboard shortcuts guide? I’m coming up empty on basic docs.

    Issue: Keyboard shortcuts list was difficult to find in the app, and online docs were extremely minimal.

  5. @alexstine Got to be honest, this experienced is pretty terrible in comparison (to Slack). There is just no way to navigate the app globally. Slack uses F6 or Ctrl+F6 in the browser, and none of these work in Element web.

    Issue: Inability to navigate around the app is a major problem for screen reader users.

  6. @alexstine …There is no global navigation shortcut. This is going to be an absolute nightmare to use outside of fairly advanced users. It’s like Discord, passes useability standards but not by much.

    Issue: This is a common problem in applications that have done a good job with micro accessibility issues, but haven’t given significant consideration to macro issues. E.g., buttons are labeled and it’s possible to move from control to control, but the larger scope of navigation and orientation isn’t sufficient.

  7. @joedolson (Android Element app, Talkback) Worked OK in Android/Talkback. I didn’t explore extensively, and found one unlabeled button, but message navigation and authoring was fairly easy.

    Issue: The unlabeled button was the ‘Threads’ button, if I remember correctly.

  8. @Travel_girl I don’t know how to access the rooms via keyboard (if the room is not already open) as the tabindex is not consistent.

    Issue: While Ctrl+K can be used to open a command center to search rooms, navigating via various standard keyboard commands doesn’t move you around the page in a very predictable manner. This would be less of an issue if there was better exposure of keyboard commands.

  9. @alh0319 (Amber Hinds) When you open the more information button in the web app it doesn’t shift focus into that panel and so it’s essentially as if it’s not there. I haven’t even figured out how to tab into it.

    Issue: Loss of focus prevents users from using important interfaces.

  10. @joesimpsonjr Had difficult uploading an image (random I know) but no ability to add ALT text.

    Issue: Users cannot add alternative text to images. This makes images inherently inaccessible to screen reader users.

  11. @alh0319 I’m Mac, Chrome. I can get to the button and it reads[sic] as a button, but the space bar and Return key don’t trigger it. I think it’s acting as though my focus is still in the message list.

    Issue: Seems like a problem with custom key events not firing correctly. I’m not 100% clear what the context of this was; in the conversation thread, it may have been referring to the upload image button.

  12. @alh0319 Also if you search for a person to send them a DM, there is no way to get to the results for the person. The “button” to select the person is a div.

    Issue: This refers to the People > Start Chat button in the navigation 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.. There is no way to navigate using the keyboard to choose a person to chat with.

  13. Numerous people commented on the lack of formatting controls. While formatting can be done in markdown (or at least markdown-like syntax), not all users are familiar with these options. There was no documentation of how to do this in the app that we could locate.

  14. @joedolson I also don’t like that there’s no border that indicates where the message text area is located. I keep clicking above it.

    Issue: Especially for low vision users, having a well-defined indication where you need to click to initiate an action is very helpful.

Reviewed by @alexstine for technical accuracy and clarity.

joesimpsonjr 2:59 pm on August 30, 2023
Tags: ,   

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: September 1, 2023

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly 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 on Friday, September 1, 2023, 16:00 UTC.

Updates from working groups:

  • Design
  • Documentation
  • General
  • 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/
  • Media
  • 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.
  • Themes

Open floor:

  • Discussion: adding Accessibility Checker to wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug scrub will also be held on Friday, September 1, 2023, 15:00 UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#accessibility, #agenda