Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: September 15, 2023

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly 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 on Friday, September 15, 2023, 16:00 UTC.

Updates from working groups:

  • Design
  • Documentation
  • General
  • 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/
  • Media
  • MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.
  • Themes

Open floor

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug scrub will also be held on Friday, September 15, 2023, 15:00 UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#accessibility, #agenda

Accessibility Office Hours

In an effort to improve 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) knowledge in the WordPress project, the accessibility team will hold Office Hours every Wednesday at 14:00 UTC, starting on September 20th.

The purpose of this initiative is to provide a dedicated space and time to discuss accessibility principles and best practices.

When

The first accessibility office hours will be Wednesday, September 20, 2023 at 14:00 UTC in the #accessibility Slack channel.

Why

It’s difficult to find opportunities to discuss general accessibility principles and best practices in depth. Accessibility team meetings mainly focus on issues that emerge during the release cycle and bug scrubs focus on specific TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets or 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/ issues.

The accessibility office hours is not a space to discuss specific issues. Instead, it’s meant to be a learning opportunity for everyone. It’s a space where everyone can help everyone improve their accessibility knowledge.

Though this is a meeting focused on accessibility, everyone is welcome, so please drop in and say hello if you have time! Feel free to contribute discussion points and leave them in the comments on this post.

Office hours as a metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. project

In the accessibility team there’s not much prior experience about the best way to hold this kind of meeting. This is an opportunity to get participants involved in setting the best way to structure these sessions. All are welcome to join and propose ways we can organize topics to prioritize them in the most efficient way.

All participants contribution will also be key to discuss whether and how to collect the outcome of the meetings discussions in a series of documented, shared, best practices.

What if I can’t make it?

Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC may not fit with everyone’s spare time or time zone. Depending on the requests and number of participants, the accessibility team is open to running a second office hours session on a different day and at a later time. Please do feel free to let us know what would work for you in the comments.

#a11y, #meeting

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: September 1, 2023

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly 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 on Friday, September 1, 2023, 16:00 UTC.

Updates from working groups:

  • Design
  • Documentation
  • General
  • 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/
  • Media
  • MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.
  • Themes

Open floor:

  • Discussion: adding Accessibility Checker to 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/

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug scrub will also be held on Friday, September 1, 2023, 15:00 UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#accessibility, #agenda

WCUS 2023 Contributor Day Summary

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 had 24 contributors working on various projects during the 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. US 2023 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/.. The session started with an orientation for new contributors on getting involved with the accessibility team as a developer or tester.

Amber Hinds (@alh0319) gave a demonstration of how to use keyboard navigation and VoiceOver for people who were not familiar with screen readers or accessibility testing. WordPress targets 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/.) 2.1 AA conformance for WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., 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/, and Twenty X themes.

@joedolson and @alexstine led a table of developers and assisted them in getting setup with local environments so they can submit patches to core and Gutenberg. Three new contributors got set up with local environments for patching and testing.

Projects Worked On

After the onboarding, contributors worked on the following projects:

Testing Twenty Twenty-Four

Multiple people tested the new Twenty Twenty-Four theme. Issues were opened in 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 for Twenty Twenty-Four related to accessibility issues in the theme itself or 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. patterns included in the theme.

Testers included:

There is a Google sheet for tracking what has already been tested in Twenty Twenty-Four. The theme is not fully tested, and contributors are encouraged to continue testing and logging issues beyond contributor day. Please track what you have tested in the spreadsheet or reference it if you’re not sure what still needs to be tested.

When testing Twenty Twenty-Four @robpetrin noted that there are both block patterns created by the theme and core. If you want to disable the block patterns created by core to only test block patterns in the theme, Rob provided this code, which can be added to the functions.php file to disable core blocks.

add_action('init', function() {
	remove_theme_support('core-block-patterns');
});

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/ Accessibility Statement

Blake Bertuccelli-Booth (@elblakeo31) led a discussion about adding an accessibility statement to the footer of WordPress.org. There is not currently an accessibility statement for the WordPress.org website and contributors would like to see one added.

These are the steps identified to move forward with creating an accessibility statement:

  1. Domain discovery to determine what pages exist.
  2. Discussing WCAG Guidelines and what standards the WordPress website should strive for.
  3. Reviewing existing accessibility statements for similar projects or template sites (such as Drupal, UK examples, 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/.’s template, etc.)
  4. Testing web pages to identify existing issues or current accessibility status.
  5. Creating a draft statement in a Google Doc for the community to review.

Domantas Gudeliauskas. (@domantasgudeliauskas) created a spreadsheet of subdomains on WordPress.org and determined that there at 285,631 pages on WordPress.org, including subdomain sites, that might ned to be tested for accessibility problems.

There are several discussion threads in #accessibility for people who are interested in continuing this discussion and work.

Bug Scrub

Developers who worked on resolving existing accessibility tickets in TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and GitHub include:

We got one new WordPress account set up, three developers set up with new local environments, and reviewed, researched, and patched several accessibility tickets.

Thank You

Thank you again to everyone who contributed during Contributor Day. We look forward to seeing everyone at a future Accessibility team meeting.

Thanks to @joedolson for reviewing this post.

X-post: Community Summit Discussion Notes: Accessibility in the WordPress Project

X-comment from +make.wordpress.org/summit: Comment on Community Summit Discussion Notes: Accessibility in the WordPress Project

X-post: Hallway Hangout: Improving accessibility in the Site Editor

X-comment from +make.wordpress.org/core: Comment on Hallway Hangout: Improving accessibility in the Site Editor

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: August 18, 2023

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly 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 on Friday, August 4, 2023, 16:00 UTC.

Updates from working groups:

  • Design
  • Documentation
  • General
  • 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/
  • Media
  • MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.
  • Themes

Open floor:

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug scrub will also be held on Friday, August 18, 2023, 15:00 UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#accessibility, #agenda

Matrix Test Results

In 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) chat for Friday, August 4th, the team ran the entire meeting within Matrix, using a variety of different clients, to assess the current state of the environment for users with disabilities. If you’re not already familiar with Matrix, it’s an open-source federated chat platform that is being evaluated as a possible replacement for 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/..

Right now, it is possible to use Matrix or Slack clients to interact in a Slack meeting, so while we held our meeting using Matrix, it was recorded in the Slack accessibility channel. Review the conversation in Slack.

As long as we can use both clients to interact, there are no significant concerns. However, we need to set accessibility criteria that the Matrix experience needs to meet before it’s feasible for the project to migrate solely to that platform. (Other teams may have other criteria, of course.)

Summary

Overall, Matrix was marginally usable for screen reader users and keyboard navigation. Most buttons were labeled and possible to interact with, and it was possible for screen reader users to post messages, read messages, and change channels. (Or rooms, in Matrix terminology.)

However, there were significant barriers to usability that would make the experience slow and frustrating for both these groups of users. As a productivity tool, it would significantly decrease the productivity and participation rate of users with disabilities.

Issues Noted

Please note that this was not a formal testing scenario, and should not be considered complete. This was a live interactive session in which we explored the environment trying to discover as much as we could in a short time.

  1. @alexstine (NVDA, Windows, Chrome, expert screen reader user) So far, I’m finding the web version of Element not verbose at all, causing me to really explore the page to get anything useful.

    Issue: Using a screen reader, the application didn’t provide much in the way of orienting tools that Alex could use to efficiently locate key functions and information.

  2. @Travel_Girl (Maja Benke) (Element web app, Firefox, Dark Mode, prefers reduced motion) I find it hard with keyboard to use it, but I’m not a native keyboard user.

    Issue: Two fundamental issues here. First, the keyboard shortcuts are difficult to locate. Second, the keyboard shortcuts are inadequate, and don’t provide tools for moving between application regions or navigating messages.

  3. @alexstine Landmarks are lacking and I can’t figure out how to predictably access the message list.

    Issue: As above, this is a lack of orienting tools and navigation mechanisms for reading messages.

  4. @alexstine Can you find a keyboard shortcuts guide? I’m coming up empty on basic docs.

    Issue: Keyboard shortcuts list was difficult to find in the app, and online docs were extremely minimal.

  5. @alexstine Got to be honest, this experienced is pretty terrible in comparison (to Slack). There is just no way to navigate the app globally. Slack uses F6 or Ctrl+F6 in the browser, and none of these work in Element web.

    Issue: Inability to navigate around the app is a major problem for screen reader users.

  6. @alexstine …There is no global navigation shortcut. This is going to be an absolute nightmare to use outside of fairly advanced users. It’s like Discord, passes useability standards but not by much.

    Issue: This is a common problem in applications that have done a good job with micro accessibility issues, but haven’t given significant consideration to macro issues. E.g., buttons are labeled and it’s possible to move from control to control, but the larger scope of navigation and orientation isn’t sufficient.

  7. @joedolson (Android Element app, Talkback) Worked OK in Android/Talkback. I didn’t explore extensively, and found one unlabeled button, but message navigation and authoring was fairly easy.

    Issue: The unlabeled button was the ‘Threads’ button, if I remember correctly.

  8. @Travel_girl I don’t know how to access the rooms via keyboard (if the room is not already open) as the tabindex is not consistent.

    Issue: While Ctrl+K can be used to open a command center to search rooms, navigating via various standard keyboard commands doesn’t move you around the page in a very predictable manner. This would be less of an issue if there was better exposure of keyboard commands.

  9. @alh0319 (Amber Hinds) When you open the more information button in the web app it doesn’t shift focus into that panel and so it’s essentially as if it’s not there. I haven’t even figured out how to tab into it.

    Issue: Loss of focus prevents users from using important interfaces.

  10. @joesimpsonjr Had difficult uploading an image (random I know) but no ability to add ALT text.

    Issue: Users cannot add alternative text to images. This makes images inherently inaccessible to screen reader users.

  11. @alh0319 I’m Mac, Chrome. I can get to the button and it reads[sic] as a button, but the space bar and Return key don’t trigger it. I think it’s acting as though my focus is still in the message list.

    Issue: Seems like a problem with custom key events not firing correctly. I’m not 100% clear what the context of this was; in the conversation thread, it may have been referring to the upload image button.

  12. @alh0319 Also if you search for a person to send them a DM, there is no way to get to the results for the person. The “button” to select the person is a div.

    Issue: This refers to the People > Start Chat button in the navigation sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme.. There is no way to navigate using the keyboard to choose a person to chat with.

  13. Numerous people commented on the lack of formatting controls. While formatting can be done in markdown (or at least markdown-like syntax), not all users are familiar with these options. There was no documentation of how to do this in the app that we could locate.

  14. @joedolson I also don’t like that there’s no border that indicates where the message text area is located. I keep clicking above it.

    Issue: Especially for low vision users, having a well-defined indication where you need to click to initiate an action is very helpful.

Reviewed by @alexstine for technical accuracy and clarity.

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: August 4, 2023

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly 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 on Friday, August 4, 2023, 16:00 UTC.

Updates from working groups:

  • Design
  • Documentation
  • General
  • 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/
  • Media
  • MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.
  • Themes

Open floor:

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug scrub will also be held on Friday, August 4, 2023, 15:00 UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress 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/. (requires registration).

#accessibility, #agenda

Testing Matrix

The goal 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 for August 4th, 2023 is to run our meeting in Matrix to give it a test for accessibility in various contexts. For the purposes of testing, we’ll want to have a diverse collection of devices and modes: high contrast, screen readers, etc., to get different perspectives on what works best.

Online App

Open the Element web app.

Change the home server from ‘matrix.org’ to ‘community.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/

Log-in using the WordPress.org single sign-on.

Use in browser.

Embedded Chat

Go to https://make.wordpress.org/meta/chat/

Behavior is unpredictable depending on your current interaction state with this page. You may see an error and need to back up a couple of steps until you get a sign in option. 

Follows the same sign-in process through SSO; only gives access to the one embedded room.

This method will probably not be very useful for us in testing, but worth looking at.

Apps

There are a lot of different apps for Matrix. Browse all apps.

Choose one and install it. You’ll need to set your server to https://community.wordpress.org and log-in. 

  • Element
  • FluffyChat
  • Syphon
  • Quadrix