This week in WordPress Accessibility, November 13, 2017

Transcript in Slack

Planning and focus for WP 5.0

  • 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/, testing an fixing
  • Finishing the first version of the handbook
  • Media tickets (if there is time left)

The handbook

The content of what to do on a WP contributors day in the handbook has been updated.

The work on best practices is in progress. Maja Benke, Sami Keijonen, Rian Rietveld and Stefan Brechbühl are writing. Joe Dolson and William Patton are proof reading and reviewing. We have a deadline of mid January for all draft content but we already publish what is ready and reviewed.

Gutenberg

We’ll test during contributor days. Andrea pointed out that he needs more help testing and fixing. There are still a lot of open issues. We discussed how to solve this, it’s hard to get more people involved.

As 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) test team: most gave up on Gutenberg and there is hardly any useful response anymore. Maybe we started testing too soon. There was a discussion if and how we can use the test server we have on wpaccess.org, without a conclusive outcome.

Open floor

The time of the meetings will be one hour later:

  • Bug scrub: 16:00 UTC
  • Team meeting: 17:00 UTC

Accessibility news

#accessibility-team-meetup

This week in WordPress Accessibility, October 24, 2017

Transcript in Slack

Please note: the times of our meetings have changed.

Handbook

Because of work and holidays, the last month not much work was done on the handbook. But as from now we will pick up writing again. The goal still is to have the handbook finished mid March 2018 (with all the text ready for review around mid January).

Tickets/Issues for contributor days

We need a page to refer to on contributor days with a list of tickets and issues to work on. Preferable tickets without a long history of discussion. Like “good-first-bugs” or keyword related tickets or 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/ “Good first issue”. @afrecia provided a list and Rian will create the page.

Our focus for 5.0

For the WordPress 5.0 release we will focus on 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) of Gutenberg. There are still a lot of Gutenberg a11y tickets open and discussions to be held and testing to be done.

HTML5 landmarks

Marco Zehe published recently: Firefox 57 will be less chatty to screen readers in some situations. FireFox will treat HTML5 landmarks differently. This has implications for the changes just made in the Underscores theme. @samikeijonen is researching this.

Also Apple VoiceOver doesn’t announce the footer if no role="contentinfo" is added. This seems like a bug.

We will wait until FireFox 57 is officially out and will test this with FF/NVDA and Safari/Voiceover.

Good reads

#accessibility-team-meetup

Changed accessibility meeting times!

Because the regular 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) meeting was at the same time as the design meeting, we rescheduled our meetings.

New times, same place (in the 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/. #accessibility channel)

This week in WordPress Accessibility, October 2, 2017

Transcript in Slack

Labels when multiple same landmark roles in the same page

Related tickets:

  • #42056: Twenty Seventeen: role=”complementary” are missing labels
  • #42057: Add ability to pass a label for the element returned by get_search_form()

This issue applies only to roles that are also landmark regions. They’re reported by screen readers as navigational element and, when there are more then one of them, there’s the need to disambiguate them in the same way we’ve done for navigation menus.
@williampatton will respond to the tickets with the conclusion of our discussion and some examples.

screen-reader-text class check

Recently the screen-reader-text class has been updated, see #40970: Update and audit the screen-reader-text CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. class used in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. We discussed if this was the right CSS as some screen-reader-text is read out in reversed order by Apple VoiceOver. This is depending on the height to the element containing the screen-reader-text class. As this already was the case before we changed the class, we blame Apple and leave the class as is.
As soon as the screen-reader-text page is added to the handbook, we will update all instances of this class in the wp.org documentation, referring to that page.

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/ frontend markup

@samikeijonen tested and reported the frontend markup of the blocks Gutenberg produces.

We discussed the results and saw issues with the semantics, 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/. and 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/. validation. At the request of @karmatosed, @samikeijonen will create an issue for this on the 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/ repo of Gutenberg.

Also the inline CSS that is added to the HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. was discussed.
Sami suggested an option add_theme_support( gutenberg ) to set inline styles to false or replace inline CSS with classes. Inline styles inhibit the ability of users to use their own custom stylesheets and create a barrier to tools that customise the view. Inline CSS is also not good for rendering performance and SEO added @Joostdevalk.
It also would be useful if theme authors could disable blocks or functionality like the adjusting the text and background colours.

Related issues on GitHub:

#weekly-meetings

Accessibility work at WordCamp Nijmegen

@tacoverdo announced at the start of 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. Nijmegen that the Twitter hashtag #WCNMGN needed to be capitalised for screen reader users. And a lot of people did, thank you!

Work on the Contributors day

  • @choongsavvii worked with @jrf on the keyboard 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) of the main menu in 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/. @obenland pointed out that this part is not 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. and it’s can’t be fixed by changing the CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. only. To be continued.
  • @travel_girl worked on the new Handbook
  • @rianrietveld was table lead and gave an intro to a group of people about the basis of Accessibility
  • @maartenleenders and @jaapwiering worked on tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets labeled accessibility. Finding it hard to choose a ticket, as most tickets are discussed for a long time and it’s difficult to get into this fresh in such a short time as om the contributors day.

Ideas from the Hallway tracks

Automated a11yAccessibility 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) testing

This topic came up again and again. @jrf (Juliette Reinders Folmer) gave a talk “The Biggest WP Core Patch Ever” about trac ticket 41057, upgrading coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. to the coding standards. And after that talk I had many discussions about integrating accessibility in all the automated testing we do. For core, but also for themes in the repository and for pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party and theme development in WordPress.

After the Handbook is in good shape, I think we need to pick this up as focus for the Accessibility Team. This will probably be begin next year. @jrf and @spacedmonkey want to help and there are probably more people and companies we can ask to help.

Which tickets are easy to pick up

Before a WordCamp contributors day we need a better list of tickets and issues for developers to work on. That have a very specific clear solution and not a debate of years without conclusion.

CTA

Help @boemedia with her research on the usability of the Admin by filling out her survey.

#wordcamp

Accessibility work at WordCamp Brighton

Talks about 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)

Work on the contributors day

  • Maja worked on the new Handbook, setting up a page about dyslexia
  • @kau-boy (Bernhard Kau) created a patch for the menu in the Handbook Chapter menu
  • Bernhard and Rian a11yAccessibility 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) reviewed 2017.europe.wordcamp.org. As a result we also need to address some issues in JetPack (follow up Rian)
  • Rian did a Accessibility Q&A with about 5 people.
  • We had a discussion with @karmatosed (Tammie Lister) on how to know what to test for with new functionality in 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/. Conclusion for now: follow the change log
  • The marketing team worked a checklist for writing accessible content. There was a discussion about PDFs, how they can be made accessible. This needs to be added to the new Handbook. The checklist will be send to the a11y team for review (follow up @anafransilva (Ana Silva))

Community Conduct Project – Kick off meeting scheduled for 17:00 UTC on the 5th September 2017

Community Conduct Project – Kick off meeting scheduled for 17:00 UTC on the 5th September 2017

This week in WordPress Accessibility, August 14th, 2017

Transcript of the meeting

Handbook

The work for rewriting and reorganising the Handbook is in progress: @samikeijonen, @travel_girl and @rianrietveld are writing the first topics, @joedolson is reviewing them. We plan to write at least one topic per week. And the deadline for the first iteration of handbook is March 1, 2018. We enjoy the discussions 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/.: writing everything down makes us really think about what the best practices are.

SelectWoo

We send the SelectWoo demo pages to the testers for assistive technologyAssistive technology Assistive technology is an umbrella term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities and also includes the process used in selecting, locating, and using them. Assistive technology promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to, or changing methods of interacting with, the technology needed to accomplish such tasks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_technology testing and hope to get feedback this week. The testers will add their findings to the 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/ issue Review SelectWoo accessibility.

Codemirror for WP 4.9

Because the addition of Codemirror is planned for WP 4.9, we started the discussion with ticket #12423 again. On GitHub it’s available as a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party, so we’ve opened an issue with our concerns of a code highlighter as default text editor. It’s not accessible for screen reader users. The plugin is also installed on our test server at wpaccess.org/codemirror/ for user testing if needed.

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/

We installed Gutenberg, from Git Master, on our test server and asked testers to test again, the first test we did was a few months ago and a lot has changed in the meantime. The results are collected and published by @karmatosed on GitHub, labeled feedback.

The next test should be a review of the output of all blocks on the frontend.

Next meeting

  • The next meeting will be at August 28, because too many people are on holiday the 21st.
  • On every Thursday we will informally discuss the handbook during the day.

Thanks @samikeijonen @travel_girl @joedolson @arush @nicbertino @zakkath @karmatosed @sergeybiryukov for joining the discussions.

#weekly-meetings

WPa11y documentation meeting

Attending: @travel_girl, @samikeijonen, @sergeybiryukov and @rianrietveld

Goal of the meeting:

Kickoff meeting for rewriting and reorganising the documentation on 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/ regarding web 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).
We want the documentation set up so that it’s complete, without duplicates, easy to find and put it on places where people actually will read it.

What we agreed on:

  • We will start with our own handbook
  • In the topic spreadsheet we gather topics and assign ourself to write about them
  • We will add topics as we go
  • We will write in Google Docs (Sami opened a directory for this)
  • We can organise the topic later in a logical way before publishing them in the accessibility handbook
  • We report and discuss our work every Thursday in the #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
  • The goal is to write one topic a week per person
  • When the topics are added to the handbook, we will review the current documentation on wp.org to see where we can ask the teams to replace/add/modify text to prevent double info and to link to better information.

For the topics we want to keep a template, for example:

  • Topic
  • Short intro with:
    • Good Practice
    • Bad Practice
    • Why
    • Exceptions
  • Examples
  • Resources with links

We don’t want to copy all the info there already is on the web, but point to good info and examples.

If more people want to join in, you are most welcome.

#documention

This week in WPA11y, July 31, 2017

Transcript of the meeting

Handbook and Documentation

@samikeijonen , @travel_girl and @rianrietveld will work together to look at the current documentation on 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/ about 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) and see how they can improve and extend that.
Rian will setup meetings for this.

Test output 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/ in the frontend

@afercia set up a page on our test server with all blocks from Gutenberg version 0.5.0. We need to test if this code is valid and accessible, as this will end up on all WP websites eventually. There was a discussion about the usefulness of testing now, as G. is moving and changing so fast at the moment. Also G. 0.6 is already out: Andrea will set up a page for that too. Especially galleries and other complex HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. constructions are imported to test.

We still need more developers who can work on the accessibility of Gutenberg.

Manage a11yAccessibility 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) tickets

We should be more vigorous about blocking implementation chatter during bug scrubs and keep the discussion about solving the issue with the ticket itself. This way we have more time to also look at the Gutenberg issues on 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/.

Open floor

#weekly-meetings