As the first Release Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. of WordPress 5.9 shipped on January 4, 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 is already gearing up for the next major release A set of releases or versions having the same major version number may be collectively referred to as “X.Y” -- for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, and all other versions in the 5.2. (five dot two dot) branch of that software. Major Releases often are the introduction of new major features and functionality..
The 6.0 development cycle details and the potential release date are yet to be defined, pending a decision about the schedule for WordPress releases in 2022. Still, WordPress 6.0 Alpha began on January 4, and Trunk is now open for business; also, in case there will be four major releases in 2022, early planning will be essential to get things included in time for each release, especially if we want to tackle large projects.
Because of that, the Accessibility Team wants to revive the tradition started with WordPress 5.6 to collect ideas and ask for public feedback about possible team’s goals, which is why you’re invited to leave a comment below and propose which accessibility improvements you’d like to see shipped with WordPress 6.0.
The discussion to identify major team goals will be held during the next weekly meeting, happening on Friday, January 21, 2021 at 17:00 UTC in the #accessibility channel of the Making WordPress Slack 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).
You’re more than invited to share your ideas, take part in the discussion and suggest what to prioritize. Just remember that, while the Accessibility Team is doing its best to make WordPress as accessible as possible, our team’s resources are limited and we’ll have to carefully decide what to focus on.
In case you aren’t aware, the Accessibility Team is organized into seven working groups, focusing respectively on Design, Documentation, Media, Meta 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., General, Gutenberg 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 Themes. Such an internal organization has proven successful in keeping issues moving more quickly: as such, in the end, it’ll be up to each working group to decide what to work on and assess if a suggested goal can be completed by the 6.0 release or not.
If a certain goal isn’t selected for the 6.0 release, anyway, it might be reconsidered in the future and become a goal for one of the next WordPress major releases (maybe already in WordPress 6.1).
In general, trying to focus on goals that can be reached in a single release cycle is the best option to be sure that the work gets completed: if you think that solving a specific issue or adding a new feature may require work that spans over multiple releases, let us know and we’ll find together a solution to get this working.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments below or in the #accessibility channel on Slack.
