Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: March 12, 2021

These are the 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 on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.

Meeting time change following Daylight Saving Time introduction

Meeting and bug scrub times will stay the same. Bug scrub at Friday 15:00 UTC and meeting at Friday 16:00 UTC. The day will stay the same on Friday.

Improvement of onboarding for new contributors

Here is a list of ideas that the accessibility team came up with to improve the onboarding process for new contributors to the accessibility team.

• Add information about the bi-monthly meeting for new core contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org. to the accessibility handbook
• Ease participation to tickets and issues with good-first-bug and needs-accessibility-feedback labels: make them more discoverable and improve how to ask for feedback from team members about them
• Add a Slackbot welcome announcement when someone joins the #accessibility channel on 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/.
• Update the “Get involved” chapter in the accessibility handbook and make the handbook more friendly for new contributors (discussion will happen in the #accessibility-docs channel on Slack)

Open floor

@annezazu informed the team that Taylor Arndt very kindly joined a Zoom meeting to share some feedback around the Full Site Editing experience when using screen readers. Here’s a quick summary of issues to be aware of (she’ll include some of these in a recap post she’s doing for the FSE Outreach Program’s second call for testing):

• Unable to edit blocks once while using Jaws (previously reported, have flagged with various coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. editor contributors this week)
• The “Save” button does not have an aria label making it very difficult to save
• Columns Block doesn’t give enough information around location based on aria labels
• Social icon buttons are unlabeled (previously reported)
• Selecting multiple blocks in order to mass delete results isn’t descriptive enough (previously reported)

@annezazu also flagged the following items:

• FSE Program Testing Call #3: Create a fun & custom 404 page needs help with testing
• Full Site Editing Pre-Merge Overview for communication work to be aware of
• Accessibility in the Block Editor post with a nice overview of features

Here are a couple other issues brought up by the team.

• Select all shortcut selects all blocks instead of content in block (Microsoft Edge)
• Add skip-link to FSE themes

If you have time to review/contribute to the new accessibility standards, your feedback is welcome and much appreciated.

#meeting-notes