Support Team summary for January 15th

For today’s meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. the support team welcomed @karmatosed from the Theme team and @joedolson from 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 and the agenda was “How can support assist those two teams?”

This resulted in the following points being discussed.

  • There are always themes that need reviewing and any help offered there will be greatly appreciated.
  • Cross team training for support to learn more about themes would be good.
  • Tammie introduced us to the idea of learnups.
  • What constitutes an accessibility support topic?
  • Tagging topics correctly to make it easier to find or monitor via email or RSS.

Learnups

Everyone got excited at this idea and one example was summed up like so:

“Pick your favorite theme and answer 4 questions. At least one is outside your ‘normal wheelhouse’.”
So like if you’re the bee’s knees for css, try editing functions.

Theme team learnups have happened on Google Hangouts to be recorded and on 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/.. A Support Challenge learnup can be scheduled or even an afternoon sprint to reply to support topics.

This is a great idea and will be explored further. Think of it as an online mini 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/. for support.

What make a topic about accessibility?

Joe had some questions about how does the support team work, are there any requirements or training involved etc. Most of the support team started by getting involved in the forums or IRC. Except for having some 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. and CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. experience and remaining calm there really is not much to do to get started in support.

A legitimate accessibility topic is anything that impacts people using assistive technologyAssistive technology Assistive technology is an umbrella term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities and also includes the process used in selecting, locating, and using them. Assistive technology promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to, or changing methods of interacting with, the technology needed to accomplish such tasks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_technology or with a disability that doesn’t impact people in other environments.

Using good tags on topics

For accessibility support a real problem is finding topics. This lead to a conversation on how to tag topics and Mika wrote up a good post on that subject. Joe’s forum account was upgraded to moderator to permit him to use some of the search in the backend as well as remove tags from topics that are incorrectly tagged “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)”.

This meetup ran a little on the long side (over 1 hour) but it was good and inviting people from other teams was really useful. It resulted in some good conversations and there will be more of these meetings as well as possibly scheduling a learnup session.

Read the transcript of today’s meetup.

#support