Design meeting notes

A new week, a new meeting in the WordPress design team. Woo hoo! You can follow the posted agenda here.

Update PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. page

First up, we chatted about the update PHP page in WordPress. Felix Artnz shared the need for design support.

He is representing the #core-php team, and has been working on helping site owners update outdated versions of PHP. Link to the Slack chat conversation.

The update PHP page is an important part of all this. They’re looking for design help on the page, updating visual assets and the copy. Jayman Pandya volunteered to help and give updates back to the channel with Felix.

Site Health Check project

Earlier today Tim Hengeveld shared a call for design to join on an exciting project. I want to use the nifty embed feature in this post, check it out!

Communication within Design

We also briefly walked through preferred methods of communication in the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Design team. Often the question comes up about where information should be shared. Should it be put into TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing., 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/, 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/.? The Make WordPress blog?

Any of these can work, but in general try to put discussions in a place available to all team members, and reference those back to the Slack channel when possible.

That’s what Slack is for, an open communication avenue for anyone to jump in and follow!

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 design

Luke Pettway and Meagen Voss have been working hard recently to build a bridge between 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) (accessibility team) and design. Tammie shared a few questions with the channel:

  • How can we continue to build things together?
  • What steps can we do to bring a11y into our workflow at all stages?
  • What would people like to learn about a11y to be more enabled?

We discussed the need for more understanding of the needs of the a11y team. Luke Pettway volunteered to share a walkthrough (potentially as videos) of ways we can help!

Accessibility and handbooks

Luke Pettway and Meagen Voss have also been looking at updating the handbooks for each team in WordPress to include accessibility information. They could see various accessibility plugins created for the tools the design team uses (Sketch, InVision, and maybe Figma)

It’s important to consider a11y early on since some of the biggest problems can arise during the planning stage, before anything is even designed.

We also discussed ways that we can continue to communicate and connect more closely so that we’re all working together with a single focus.

Luke Pettway also shared a link to resources, as a starting point for anyone interested in learning more.

The a11y team would love to help in anyway that’s needed!

#meeting-notes