WordPress constantly evolves and improves. It is never “done.” The same is true of WordPress 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). Changes in design, user experience, and code need to be evaluated.
The Accessibility Team provides continuing reviewing and educational support for WordPress’ accessibility.
Team meetings are held every two weeks in 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/. Check the schedule for our next meeting.
Accessibility Team focus
The accessibility of WordPress
The team monitors the accessibility of WordPress’ new releases and gives feedback with fixes and discussions.
Known issues for coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. are tracked in tickets with a focus on accessibility on WordPress TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and in issues Focus Accessibility (a11y) in 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/ repository for 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/ 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. editor.
The team also reviews the so-called bundled themes, shipped with WordPress.
Contact: Joe Dolson (@joedolson).
The accessibility-ready program
Theme developers may request an optional accessibility review as part of the theme review process or later for an existing theme.
Submitted themes (or theme updates) that pass a manual review are approved to use the accessibility-ready tag and show up in the theme directory as accessibility-ready.
The Accessibility Team maintains the guidelines for the accessibility-ready program and reviews if submitted themes meet the accessibility-ready requirements.
Contact: Amber Hinds (@alh0319).
Documentation and education
To help and educate the community, the team writes documentation about accessibility for:
- WP Accessibility Knowledge Base, extended documentation about web accessibility for WordPress users and creators.
- Accessibility Coding Standards for WordPress core.
- Theme developers handbook, the section about accessibility, with accessibility requirements for themes submitted to the themes repository.
- Accessibility handbook, about the team and their work.
- About accessibility, the main information about WordPress’ accessibility.
Contact: Rian Rietveld (@rianrietveld).
