These is the bi-weekly notes for the 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 meeting that happens on alternate Thursday in #accessibility. You can read the full transcript here or see the full meeting schedule.
Working Group Updates
Docs
@rianrietveld shared that the work is in progress on wpaccessibility.org:
- update of the documentation about testing for accessibility.
- add more internal resources to the different topics, to cross link the information on the site.
General
@joedolson shared the updates:
- Work is progressing toward the WordPress 7.0 release. Because of the current uncertainty around the release timeline, work on 7.1 has been moving slowly.
- The major open question is whether the 7.1 cycle will be shortened or delayed, which may directly affect the scope of work. Due to this uncertainty, current priorities will focus on already-milestoned issues instead of adding new items.
Gutenberg
Primary need is to work on the many accessibility issues that @joedolson cited on visual revisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision.. Some of the work is already in progress, so at least some of the issues (and many of the most critical ones) will make it for 7.0
Please check https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/77530 for the reference.
Themes
The update was already share for accessibility-ready requirements. These are effective immediately, and we’ll be doing a big push to get existing themes updated.
Meta & Contribution Tracking Discussion
- Attention was drawn to ongoing work in
#meta-janitors, where several rapid changes are happening across WordPress.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/ that may require accessibility review and input.
- A discussion was introduced around automated contribution tracking for the accessibility team as part of the evolving Five for the Future (FFTF) initiative.
- The goal is to move beyond self-reported contribution hours and instead rely more on measurable contribution data such as:
- Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. commits
- Trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/./GitHub 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/ activity
- Patches and PRs
- Ticket participation
- It was also acknowledged that many valuable contributions are harder to track, including:
- Accessibility reviews
- Documentation work
- Expert guidance and discussions
- Work on external properties like WPAccessibility.org
Key Clarifications
- The current system is still in a very early and evolving stage.
- No implementation decisions have been made yet for the Accessibility Team.
- The team will eventually need to decide:
- Which contribution signals should be tracked
- Which data sources should be used
- Existing pages related to this initiative currently function more like prototypes/demos and are not fully connected yet.
Community Concerns Raised
- Some contributors shared that the documentation and process, especially steps 4 and 5 in the proposal, currently feel difficult to follow.
- It was clarified that:
- This initiative is not intended to change how contributors participate.
- The focus is on understanding and representing existing contributions more accurately.
Action Items / Next Steps
- Before further discussions, more clarity is needed around the technical implementation and data pipeline details.
- No immediate action items were assigned.
- The topic will be considered as a potential agenda item for a future bi-weekly meeting (likely not the next one due to GAAD scheduling).
#meeting-notes
