On Thursday, November 13, 2025, 15:00 UTC, a team meeting started in #accessibility facilitated by Nasim Miah. You can read the full transcript or see the meeting agenda.

Biweekly Team Meeting Time Update

The bi-weekly chat meeting time has changed to alternate Thursdays at 15:00 UTC, and the meeting calendar is also updated.

• WordPress 6.9 RC1 is released.
• Template management is no longer part of 6.9 release cycle and has been punted to 7.0
  The release leads have also updated the docs accordingly.
• Get ready for 6.9 RC2

Updates from working groups

Documentation:

@joedolson shared a documentation update on behalf of @rianrietveld:

• wpaccessibility.org now has a proper search function.
• Several documentation updates about webforms are under review and expected to be published soon.
• The new “Debunking 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) myths” page is available here: https://wpaccessibility.org/docs/start/myths/overlays/
• Rian is also working on implementing the new design, after which the 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/. EM-audit can begin.

A key reminder: contributors should contact @rianrietveld before starting work on any documentation section, and should not submit PRs for issues that already have an assigned owner.
@joedolson also noted ongoing problems with PRs containing AI-written documentation, which currently does not meet quality standards.

On the topic of the accessibility profile badge, @joedolson suggested that contributors working on accessibility documentation should be eligible.

• Nasim Miah agreed, noting it encourages consistent, quality contributions.
• Both agreed badge criteria may need clearer standards, aligned with other teams.
• Increased Profile Associations requests were noted; Nasim Miah also observed this trend.
• @joedolson said smaller contributions are still considered, but must meet reasonable quality.

General

@joedolson reported that with the release of 6.9 RC1, work is now shifting toward preparing for 7.0. This week’s bug scrub focused on new tickets on TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. that were awaiting review, and most of those have been milestoned for the 7.0 release.

Next week, the focus will shift to older tickets, prioritizing ones that need attention.

In this release, 33 accessibility issues were resolved on Trac and 43 issues were resolved 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/.

Gutenberg

@joedolson shared that all new 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/ features should continue to be tested during the Release CandidateRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. phase, and accessibility bugs should be resolved before release.
Features that didn’t make it into 6.9 — such as Tabs 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., Icons Block, and Template Management are likely candidates for 7.0.

He also noted that major items requiring attention are listed in the Release Progress document:
https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/current-release-progress/

🗓️ Next Meeting Schedule

@joedolson noted that the next meeting is currently set for November 27th, which falls during the US Thanksgiving holiday, meaning many contributors will be unable to attend. He proposed skipping the meeting or shifting it by a week.

Nasim Miah agreed, saying it makes sense to skip the November 27th meeting and resume on December 4th instead.

@joedolson confirmed he will update the calendar and ensure the change is clearly noted in the meeting minutes.

NOTE: If you’d like to have a topic added to the agenda for our next meeting, please mention it in the comments on an upcoming agenda.

Thank you, @joedolson for the pre-publish review.

#accessibility, #meeting-notes