Global 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) Awareness Day

I will be talking about WordPress accessibility here in Santa Monica at Yahoo! to celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on May 15. There are many events happening all over the world, perhaps there’s one close to you. If you want to celebrate GAAD but don’t have an event nearby, then here’s a suggestion from Deborah Edwards-Onoro, a front-end WordPress web developer and user experience pro: use only your keyboard for navigation for one hour.

Automated Accessibility Testing

It is necessary for me to point out that the very best enterprise-strength automated accessibility checking environments can only accurately report out about thirty percent of the errors. Nonetheless, automated testing, especially command-line testing, will be a valuable addition to the test environment, and we need to explore this. The Netherlands has a commitment to making sure that government sites are accessible, so they are supporting the development of Quail an open-source, MIT-licensed suite of tests that assess web page structure and content. The library is currently developed against WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/. and Section 508 accessibility standards. Accessibility team member David A. Kennedy wrote a great post, “WordPress needs automated accessibility testing” in which he mentions Quail and another tool, pa11y, and I recommend reading what he has to say on the topic.Thanks to David for creating a discussion on this vital topic. David was interviewed by WP Tavern this week and we look forward to seeing that posted soon.

Tenon

Karl Groves, another accessibility team member, is working on tenon.io, which is in 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. now and promises to be a very powerful accessibility checking tool. While Tenon will be proprietary, Karl tells me that: “We are going to have a Free for Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. program. As long as the project using Tenon is open source, the account is free.”

Collaboration

While there is no doubt that the accessibility team can and must improve collaboration with other WordPress teams, we are also interested in creating ways to expand our reach through innovation and also by collaboration with people doing similar work outside of WordPress. Automated testing is one way to innovate. We saw that the Quail project has created an accessibility module to work within Drupal so we invited Mike Gifford, a Drupal 8 CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Accessibility Maintainer, to our meeting this week to learn about the Drupal accessibility operation. According to Mike “Just to be clear about the automated (accessibility) testing & Drupal. It will be a great addition in the future, it’s found some interesting bugs when we have applied it, but it really has only been marginally useful thus far.” Mike agreed to share info and join forces with us where our interests are similar and we look forward to collaborating with his team and with accessibility teams for other projects.

Authoring Tool 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) Guidelines Testing

Jeanne Spellman (http://www.w3.org/People/jeanne/), W3C, joined us for the meeting to discuss the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) testing we will be doing on trunk starting May 12. ATAG testing is, in part, useful for guiding development of accessible “software for generating websites, for example, content management systems (CMS).”

ATAG Overview

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) Overview explains how ATAG testing will:

• help make authoring tools themselves accessible, so that people with disabilities can create web content, and
• help authors create more accessible web content — specifically: enable, support, and promote the production of content that conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/.).

ATAG Testing Harness

The W3CW3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.https://www.w3.org/. is developing an automated way to deliver ATAG test instructions and test result tracking and reports. It will also display WCAG test instructions and techniques, where applicable. In the the overall test instructions doc that was used when developing the tests there are general instructions at the top, followed by a table with the ATAG success criteria, and the test(s) for each one. As we are testing to WCAG level AA so will we be testing to ATAG level AA.

Process

Jeanne has about 15 volunteer testers. Thank you Jeanne! She explained the process: “We set up a page of accessible content, and a page of inaccessible content. Then we have a page of different types of content – video, audio, tables. Some of the ATAG tests check to see if WordPress breaks accessible content, while others see if WordPress fixes inaccessible content.” We discussed access to a test instance of WordPress trunk which is ready to go thanks to Rian Rietveld. There is no estimate as to how long the testing will take since it is a new process.

Helping WordPress and the W3C

This process will help improve WordPress and it will also help make ATAG 2.0 a finalized W3C standard. We are testing to WCAG level AA so we will be testing to ATAG level AA which will help the W3C process. Jeanne explained: “The writing is all done, and now we just need to prove to W3C management that there are 2 real world examples of every success criteria and 5 authoring tools have implemented ATAG level A.  AA is a huge bonus.”

Accounts and TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.

We noted that the volunteer testers will all need WordPress accounts. Aaron Jorbin very thoughtfully posted the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. handbook link to working with trac and opening a ticket. Joe Dolson noted that: “It (testing) doesn’t have to be finished to be able to create tickets – we should be ticketing every discovery as we move forward.” The W3C team will be able to pull reports of all the errors from the testing harness tool which should facilitate the process.

Team Member Thanks

Thanks all the other teams who participated in making WordPress 3.9 happen and who reached out to 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 for assistance. Many more people are asking us to check things than ever before. Special thanks to accessibility team members David A. Kennedy, Graham Armfield, and Joe Dolson who are mentioned in the 3.9 credits.

Weekly Meeting Time

There’s always confusion when the time changes and I regret that I compounded the confusion by being confused myself. I’m now using StatusClock.app by Pulsely for OS X set to GMT/UTC so I’ll be sure to call the weekly meeting to order at 19:00 UTC.

Previous Test

When the accessibility team did the last round of testing it was intended that it be done over a short period of time, but due to various factors it spread out over two months. That was a keyboard-only test because we were certain that, given our resources, we could not finish a full test. It turns out we could not finish even the attenuated test in a reasonable amount of time. This was not the intended outcome but I learned that we need many more testers to perform the testing in an effective manner. This is why I was very glad to make a testing plan with Jeanne Spellman of the W3CW3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.https://www.w3.org/. when we were at the International Technology and Persons With Disabilities Conference a month ago.

New Test Round

Jeanne Spellman of the W3C, the team contact for the User Agent Working Group and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AUWG), has committed to helping us test WordPress trunk using the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). Jeanne has assembled a good number of volunteers to do the testing and they will file tickets or bump things up to me as soon as they have identified an issue. This time I feel confident that with current team members providing guidance the W3C team will be able to accomplish the task in a short enough period of time to be most effective. Testing is now scheduled to start the week of May 12, 2014.

ATAG

For those not familiar with ATAG, it is primarily for developers of authoring tools including software for generating websites such as content management systems. There are two areas of focus: making sure that the authoring tool user interface is accessible, and that the authoring tool supports the production of accessible content. Just as with WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/. 2.0, ATAG has three levels of success criteria in order of increasing compliance: A, AA, and AAA. We are testing to WCAG 2.0 level AA so it follows that the ATAG testing will also be done to level AA. ATAG testing will help us discover the issues we need to address next. ATAG at a Glance provides a short summary of the accessibility principles and guidelines in ATAG 2.0.

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/. Activities

We discussed activities that might be suitable for contributor days.

• Suggesting amendments for Make WordPress Accessible and Codex: Accessibility
• See list of Trac tickets with focus “accessibility”
  • Testing tickets – checking if issues are still occurring, close tickets if no longer needed
  • Add detail to tickets
  • Fixing tickets

Team member Graham Armfield will be leading 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) table at the UK Contributor Day in Manchester on Saturday, March 1, and will help refine this list based on that experience.