a11y 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 title attributes
It was discussed last week at the meeting — and subsequently added to the plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party — that we would take the title attributes of linked elements that had them by default, so that in the future, adding tooltips to these things could be handled the same way they already were. However, since @grahamarmfield’s extensive review indicated that this may be a problem for screen readers, as well as the fact that core will be removing them, this behavior has been removed and will no longer be present in the next (or future) iteration. (Graham, if you want to run the updated (0.6.0) plugin through your screen reader program(s) that would be greatly appreciated 🙂 )
Tooltip pointer positioning
There are some tooltips that have somewhat “iffy” pointer positions. There are various reasons for this, but the biggest one is specificity. If we were editing core, we could add our own classes or IDs and then target things specifically, then add a tooltip to those handles. Since we aren’t, and there are some elements that don’t have their own specific wrappers (for example, some column headings), we just do the best we can. (See https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues/45 for some examples). We may come back to these later and add CSS to the pointers so they can be moved specifically for those tooltips. Moving forward, if there’s a commit adding a tooltip where this is the case, we’ll be tagging this ticket so we can keep a general record of the tooltips that are having this issue.
What we’re working on
We are primarily focusing on the task of adding tooltips to the plugin at this point. While it is acknowledged that the actual help overview content may not be the best for an always-on (at least for some users) space that is not accessed via the help tabs, without enough interest in helping write new content for these overviews, we’ve had to move on to the more pressing task of focusing on the tooltips, all of which will be entirely new (rather than being able to pull in existing content in one form or another).
@brainfork will also be looking into adding tooltips to the sidebar 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. menu items using a global tooltip doc and js file.
@zoerooney and @ubernaut will be working on updating the admin pages spreadsheet with a particular focus on identifying areas for tooltips. I’ve made this editable to anyone with a link to give more people an opportunity to contribute to this document (which hopefully won’t be a problem).
Testers and contributors are welcome — report any issues here: https://github.com/jazzsequence/WordPress-Admin-Help/issues?state=open
Pull requests are also appreciated!
As a reminder, our meeting time has changed from the time listed on the sidebar. Our next meeting will be next Monday 18:30UTC.
#admin-help, #ah-o2
