Discussion: Bringing accessibility-first approaches into content development

At WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US 2023, @jominney, @newcomer22 and team published the Training Team Accessibility Checklist 🎉 I’ve recently been considering how we can bring 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)-first approaches into the team’s content creation/review processes better.

What would it take for the team to be able to say “We’ve given our best effort to ensuring all content on Learn WordPress is accessible” when we relaunch the site with Learning Pathways in July this year? I’ve dropped some thoughts below, but this is just to get the conversation going. Let’s discuss in the comments until March 9th (Friday), and then consider next steps after that.


I noticed the WordPress project’s accessibility statement says:

WordPress aims to make the WordPress Admin and bundled themes fully 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/. 2.0 AA compliant where possible.

  • Question: Is striving for WCAG 2.0 AA compliance a reasonable standard for content on Learn WordPress, too?

The team’s current Accessibility Checklist has some items that go beyond the scope of WCAG 2.0 AA, but is also missing some items within scope. Below is my personal take on what content creators specifically would need to be mindful of in order to create content that is fully WCAG 2.0 AA compliant.

(Note, I’m specifically considering what can be achieved in the content creating process – mostly conducted within the WordPress Editor. There are other coding-related considerations that must be made in the theme etc., which is worth its own separate conversation.)

  • Question: Is the following list an accurate representation of what content creators would need to be mindful of to create WCAG 2.0 AA compliant content?
  1. All non-text content has a text alternative. (Guideline 1.1 – Text Alternatives)
  2. Captions and transcripts are provided for all videos. (Guideline 1.2 – Time-based Media)
  3. Audio description is provided for all prerecorded video content. Or, narration in video content describes all important visual details, including actions, scene changes, and on-screen text. (Guideline 1.2 – Time-based Media)
  4. Instructions do not rely solely on components such as shape, color, size, visual location, orientation, or sound. (Guideline 1.3 – Adaptable)
  5. Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element. (Guideline 1.4 – Distinguishable)
  6. Text and images of text have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. (Guideline 1.4 – Distinguishable)
  7. Unless essential, text should be used instead of images of text. (Guideline 1.4 – Distinguishable)
  8. No content flashes more than three times/second. (Guideline 2.3 – Seizures and Physical Reactions)
  9. The purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone. (Guideline 2.4 – Navigable)
  10. Headings describe topic or purpose. (Guideline 2.4 – Navigable)

Points 3 (audio descriptions for video content) is currently not included in the team’s accessibility checklist.

  • Question: In the context of video content on Learn, what would adding audio description to videos look like? Is it possible to publish videos where all necessary content is included in the narration?

Finally, I think it would be great if we could move the accessibility checklist from being a final check made on content to something embedded in content development and review processes.

  • Question: How can we bring accessibility-first approaches into our content development and review processes?

#accessibility

Choosing accessible/contrasting dark theme colors for online workshops and tutorial videos

This post seeks to define an accessible set of dark theme colors to be used in content creation. Please comment with your thoughts by Friday 18 November 2022.

Sometimes during an online workshop or recorded tutorial on the Site Editor, choosing a different set of theme colors in the Global Styles interface is required to showcase some functionality.

The content creator might want to use colors that are not already in use in other themes or default theme Global Styles variations for various reasons, such as wanting to use a specific set of colors to show how changes are saved to Global Styles in the database or copied/written to the theme.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. file in the theme.

To ensure that the colors selected are viewable on all screens, it’s important that these colors are contrasting enough so that they are accessible to everyone. 

My first attempt at finding dark colors that meet 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) guidelines was made by digging into Google’s Material Design, specifically the dark theme guidelines. From that document I extracted the following colors:

  • #121212 (the background color)
  • #BB86FC (the primary purple color)
  • #03DA5C (the secondary color)

The background color could be used for the theme background, and the primary and secondary colors could be used alternatively for text or links.

These colors were applied in a recent 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. theme tutorial video I created. During the review of that tutorial, it was raised that the color contrast in the dark theme example is very low and makes the text very hard to read.

As I am not a color contrast expert, I’d like to take this opportunity to iterate on the colors as laid out above and choose better primary and secondary colors for a dark theme that are more accessible and easier to read for online workshops and tutorials. We can then add these colors to the Training Team handbook, to be used whenever an alternative color scheme is required.

Let’s define high-contrast, accessible, dark theme colors together! What dark theme color palettes would be the most accessible? What have you seen that’s worked well? What should we avoid? Share your thoughts below and we will consolidate them into actionable suggestions by Friday 18 November 2022  to be added to the training team handbook for content creation.

#accessibility, #training-team

Recap of the Training Team meeting, January 11, 2022

Recap of the Training Team meeting, January 11, 2022

Agenda

Ways to get involved

Slack Log (Requires 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/. login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account.)

Live meeting attendees: @courane01 @rkohilakis @webtechpooja @arasae @azhiyadev @boogah @onealtr @peteringersoll @kemmy99 @elblakeo31


Meeting Notetakers


Team Goal Setting

Yesterday we concluded our team goal setting, and wow is this an exciting year.

We will have a read-out, or a summary of what was covered, published on the team site (P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/.) within a week.

Additionally, we are working toward using 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/ projects within the LearnWP repo to track milestones and goals.

We are also exploring moving our 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. management of content across. Stay tuned. Some of these will pick up after the 5.9 release.

We discussed:

  • Actions and steps that we need to take to get the job done.
  • Obstacles we face in accomplishing all this and how can we overcome them.
  • Metrics we measure can measure and how we identify if it is successful or not.

APAC friendly meeting poll results

@webtechpooja gave 3 time choices:

  • Monday 9:30 – 10:30 am UTC
  • Thursday 7:30 – 8:30 am UTC
  • Thursday 11:30 am – 12:30 pm UTC

Thursday 11:30 am – 12:30 pm UTC got the most votes.


Social Learning Spaces (SLS) streaming platforms

Last week we began discussing if we will permit using the Social Learning Spaces calendar for additional formats beyond using 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. + Zoom. We’ve moved the conversation to a post to further gather ideas and questions before proceeding.

We approved @bph, who has already been vetted for hosting social learning spaces, will move forward with dev office hours using Meetup.

The concerns to address via our handbook encompass any further concerns or consider additional documentation needs.

This will remain open until Jan 14.


Learn WordPress version taxonomy

We also need comments on this post. The idea is that for 6.0, we’d like to have public taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. that only shows content relevant to that release, while from an internal auditing need, we also need to test everything with the latest release. 2 purposes in using the taxonomy at this time, and possibly more coming in the future.

This will also remain open until Jan 14, and then move on to a GitHub issue.


Badges

Congrats to @alexstine on receiving a Training team badge. Alex has provided valuable insights on several post types, such as courses and workshops, as it relates to 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) results. We deeply value the dev contribution and #accessibility team feedback on LearnWP.


January 2022 Sprint

With the release of 5.9 scheduled for this month, all our efforts have been focused on updating Learn.

Progress so far:
.. Styles lesson plan and List View lesson plan is ready for review.

.. RevisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. completed: Backing up your site, Child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. for classic themes, Classic Editor, Content Overview, Classic Theme Menu, CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. Tagline

.. We still have a number of lesson plans and workshops that need to be revised or created. These are all listed on the Sprint.

.. For 5.9 – New Content

  1. Pick a topic, any topic from the list! Let us know in the comments or drop us a message in the #training Slack channel
  2. Get access, if you don’t have it already, to learn.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/. Ask in the #training Slack channel.
  3. If you need help creating content, we’ve got some great workshops videos ready for you to learn how to do this: Lesson plan about lesson plans, workshops about lesson plans, and Workshop about workshops

All these instructions are listed in the January 2022 Sprint post. If you get stuck, just drop us a message in Slack.

.. Types of themes, please keep this in mind when creating and revising content for Learn WordPress.:

  • 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. theme: a theme made for FSE using HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. templates and theme.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML., allowing one to manage all parts of their site with blocks.
  • Universal theme: a theme that works with both the Customizer and the Site Editor.
  • Hybrid theme: a classic theme that adopts a feature(s) of FSE, like theme.json or the template editor.
  • Classic theme: a theme built with 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. templates, functions.php, and more that does not work with Site Editor.

See FSE Program: Answers from Round Three of Questions for information about the types of themes. (edited)

Thank you to @rkohilakis Makinde Ruth Oluwakemi @ courane01 @arasae Wessel who have volunteered to work on 5.9 content.


Checkin

@azhiyadev didn’t commit anything this week. She worked on Team goal setting and 5.9 revisions and managed to revise 5 lesson plans. Time is her main blocker. She is continuing to work on the 5.9 audit.

@rkohilakis shipped the first part of the FSE courses. She is working on a big internal work project to finish up this week, and then hoping to shift focus to 5.9 workshops.

@webtechpooja is going to audit for 5.9 release .

@courane01 committed lesson plans and workshops, team goal setting, and listing all content needing to be created or revised for release. She is working on more content in lesson plans and workshops for 5.9, assist creating the team goal setting summary/read-out, close the 2 posts on SLS + Taxonomy that we’ve requested feedback, work more on GitHub project migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies..

@arasae committed on the child theme for block themes. She set up some time with a content expert (@daisyo) to see how she does this. I’ll gather some documents as well for this. She is going to work on this lesson plan and may also see what I can do about theme.json. Will communicate if I manage to figure that out enough to commit!

5.9 Learn Content Planning Parties: A Proposal

This is a proposal for a very fun, very productive, very beginner-friendly way to get involved with our training team and create some content very quickly!.

We have this incredible list of curated 5.9 content topics (if you haven’t already, check out the brilliant sprint post to see what I mean: https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/04/january-2022-sprint/) – two planned Zoom planning parties are proposed around the 5.9 release, complete with captions to make it more accessible. These two (or more, depending on interest!) Zoom parties would be scheduled at opposite ends of the day to make sure people who live in all time zones can join us.

During this planning party, we would…

  • chat about what are our highest priorities from that list (and pick some fun ones that we are interested in!)
  • Split into a few different Zoom rooms
  • explore the 5.9 release together in Zoom breakout rooms
  • generate lesson plans and new content for the 5.9 release–or at least, the messy thinking before the actual content is created

@arasae is going to pick a time and announce it.


Open Discussion

@courane01 shared a quote from the slack community:

I’m having a lot of gratitude for the great training material that the training team are putting out about FSE. I’m really excited about 5.9 and what’s to come. @wpfangirl

Recap of May 10, 2018 Meeting

@juliekuehl: First up today is the 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/. info.

https://trello.com/c/XK6lfmsm. That is a card that should be useful to anyone who wants to help with the training team during a contributor day. The marketing team graciously helped to create a Training Team specific onboarding document, which is uploaded to that card.

@juliekuehl: It has just basic info on which accounts would be needed to help the team (WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://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/.…)

@juliekuehl: The other Trello card related to Contributor Days is this one https://trello.com/c/cxKWo7KC, which is specific to WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. EU in June.

@chetan200891 @davidneeham is there anything else that you would need to lead that effort? I know we’ll need a list of lesson plans that would be good ones to work one. That’s a rolling list though.

@juliekuehl: This document is also meant for Contributor Days, but it’s going to be helpful for anyone new to the team: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mh0vGq075pH-CqyUbMNdrOz9AVaEUm9ofli0YrNaFsg/edit?usp=sharing.

@juliekuehl: There are several options there on how to jump in and get started.

@juliekuehl: So with that Google Doc in place (and it should move to the Make site before WCEU) I think we have what we need for Contributor Days now. So I think if anyone wants to represent the Training Team at any Contributor Day, we have materials to help them do so.

Slides

@juliekuehl: Slides have been a hot topic for years and the issues surrounding them have been documented here https://trello.com/c/jpp5ob7t. We had talked about using Reveal.js as our solution for slides, but recently had the #accessibility team recommend Show-er. I did run it by a metaMeta 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. team person as to whether that would work on the learn.wordpress.org site and got a thumbs up.

@juliekuehl: So I wanted to be clear that our slide solution at this point is Show-er, not Reveal and we’ll get some documentation and workflows put together around that.

@pbrocks: https://github.com/wptrainingteam/shower.

@juliekuehl: Ideally we would have one stylesheet for all the slide decks that could be updated and all that would be needed is the markup (HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites.?, md?) file.

Learn.WordPress.Org Site

@juliekuehl: So that’s it for item 2 on the agenda, but it leads into item 3 – the learn.wordpress.org site

The Trello card https://trello.com/c/ck3UjgcA has some information on it as to how we can get started to design and actually start using that domain.

@juliekuehl: We need to create a TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket for the #meta team and alert #design and #marketing to get their input too. There are some wireframes on that Trello card too as a rough concept of what that site could look like. But the idea would be to be able to push lesson plans from GitHub to the Learn siteLearn site The Training Team publishes its completed lesson plans at https://learn.wordpress.org/ which is often referred to as the "Learn" site.. (which may mean we need to slightly adjust how we are working with the master branches).

@juliekuehl: I can get that Trac ticket started as I would think it would be weeks/months before all the details would be worked out and we’d be able to actually get things together for that.

Thoughts?

chetan200891replied to a thread: But the idea would be to be able to push lesson plans from GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/.: You mean embed. Correct?

@juliekuehl: That’s some of the details that would have to be worked out by the #meta team.

@juliekuehl: Just so everyone is aware, both the Make blog site and the Learn site are not your typical WordPress installs and they have quirks and restrictions that we have to work within. The #meta team are the ones that can help us navigate that.

@juliekuehl: I wanted to wait until after today’s meeting to get that Trac ticket started. So if you have any thoughts about it, please either DM me or drop your thoughts on the Trello card or here in the #training channel. I’m sure it will take me a few days to write it up and get it submitted.

Team Survey

@juliekuehl: We have gone through so many changes in the past few months and there are many new faces here in the channel. I will admit to having lost track of who is all here and what brings them to the team.

@juliekuehl: Apologies, since I know I’ve chatted with several of you. But I think it’s time to get a little more information from folks regarding interests and skill.

@juliekuehl: I would like to ask everyone to consider filling out the information here https://goo.gl/forms/Tuus9yo3yWXRZgqA3 just so we have a better understanding of what you are interested in and able to help with. This is an optional form. You are not required to participate, but it would sure be helpful , to get the work of the team moving forward. Currently the info is restricted to just team leadership (there’s about five of us).

@tmichellemoore: @juliekuehl Would you be able to summarize the changes? I understand the team has been around for a while but am just curious as to why so many changes in the short time I have been here. I am not averse to change, just trying to gauge is it constant or was there something that happened recently?

@juliekuehl: The underlying big change was the move to GitHub. There were many reasons behind it: the loss of our image assets on the Make site, the difficulty in managing the lesson plan workflow, the difficulty in maintaining them and keeping them up to date, and there was no “workspace” everything was publicly available as it was being worked on (people were finding old, half-written info and that’s not good), and last, the Make site was intended to be a handbook (like every other team) – not the place lesson plans were actually published.

@juliekuehl: We made the decision to move probably around the time of WordCamp US and started in earnest around the first of the year.

@juliekuehl: And we had two of the three meeting leaders step away for a few months so there were changes due to that too (meaning I had no idea how it was supposed to be done, so I just made something up)

@pbrocks: Really, we have been talking about this for close to a year, it seems, and we all agreed that what we had wasn’t working and at WCUS, i was able to get FINAL confirmation that the images weren’t ever coming back. so in our meeting that Sunday we went forward full steam.

@juliekuehl: Thank you for asking @tmichellemoore. I really should put that in a blog post for the record.

Trello and LP Workflow

@juliekuehl: After looking at scores of lesson plans, I realized what a wide variation we have in approaches and quality. I think we need a QA step before copyediting. I added a “Lesson Plans Needing Instructional Review” list to the board.

@juliekuehl: Before having folks go through with a fine-toothed comb looking for typos, grammar, and style, I think we need a forest and not tree review to make sure the lesson plan fits the team’s goals. For instance, @Taylor found two duplicates already. No sense in pushing both of them forward.

@juliekuehl: And if there are any instructional designers here today, BloomBloom's Taxonomy Bloom's Taxonomy is a way of writing lesson plan objectives using specific words so that the objectives can be measured. See https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/guidelines/blooms-taxonomy/ for more details.’s TaxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. standards are lax and objective – assessment connection is practically non-existent in some of them.

@juliekuehl: Now that I think of it, there’s a new role for the team that’s not listed on the Trello board. So if you have any education / instructional design background, that would be a very good place to help out.

@tmichellemoore: I actually have a masters in instructional design.

@tmichellemoore appointed to take control of the list.

Many LP’s lacking Owners

@juliekuehl: Some need to be written from scratch while others need to be updated/rewritten – or possibly just quickly reviewed and pushed forward.

@juliekuehl: Just add yourself to the card as a Member and type your name in as Current Owner on the card and have at it. If you need any help with any part of the process, this is the place to ask!

@juliekuehl: I know it took us a while to get the GitHub workflow sorted out (and we may have just changed it slightly this morning) but we should be good to go now.

@chetan200891: I have worked on this https://github.com/wptrainingteam/widget-areas so in Trello work flow https://trello.com/c/8dd1RKWd/130-widget-areas. Can i check first 3 development checklist?

@juliekuehl: I would say only the first one.

@tmichellemoore: I have a few questions on process: I got a merge notice. I needed to add one more thing to the lesson.
If I had anything I needed to add, could I have added it before the merge or should I wait until the merge request goes through?
Who does copyedit #2?
What do I do with the card once I finish copyedit #1?

@juliekuehl: The reason there are two copy edits (and three testing rounds) is to simply have more eyeballs on the lesson plan. We’ll need to address the whole multiple branches / rebasing / etc. issue (hint hint @pbrocks).

@juliekuehl: But as far as copyediting goes, when you’re finished (meaning the pull request has been merged) we’ll need someone else to step up for the second round and do the same.

@pbrocks: When you have a branch and you do a Pull Request which is a request to merge, like @tmichellemoore is asking about they will get applied to the original pull request. IF you want them to be separate, then ou create another branch.

@juliekuehl: A video is needed to demonstrate / explain

Meeting Time

@juliekuehl: I have one final question before I have to bolt out the door… would moving this meeting up 30 minutes be a problem? Then I wouldn’t have to leave so quickly every time. I may schedule it a half hour earlier next week and see what happens.

Training Team Meeting Recap 3 May 2018

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/. Onboarding

The information requested by the WordCamp EU Team for Contributor Day info can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mh0vGq075pH-CqyUbMNdrOz9AVaEUm9ofli0YrNaFsg/edit?usp=sharing. It outlines how contributors can help the Training Team during a Contributor Day event, but it is also helpful for the team in general. The Marketing Team is also helping to create a handout specific to the Training Team that can be used to help people get started.

The learn.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ site

That site has always been the end game for the team’s lesson plans. So in this whole workflow revamp an attempt to reverse engineer our product/processes based on that being the end game was attempted. This Trello card (https://trello.com/c/ck3UjgcA) has a PDF with a few wireframes of what perhaps that site could look like. It has identified a couple of things missing from our lesson plans/workflow. We need to gather more information regarding the learn.wordpress.org site.

There was a big takeaway from that exercise. We need to be writing lesson plans with time constraints in mind. And we should be writing lesson plans that identify:

  1. Length: < 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours, possibly multi-day
  2. Audience: Speaker, User, Themer, Plugins, Developers
  3. Level: beginner, intermediate, advanced

Update on slides (Shower – show-er)

The Slides card on the 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. board has the original discussion regarding slides including the requirements and pros/cons of the various alternatives. The #accessibility team suggested https://github.com/shower/shower / https://shwr.me/

So we need to do some work on whether there are pros/cons to Reveal.js (which is what we had been considering as a solution) versus Shower (pronounced show-er). But HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites./CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site./JS still seems the best “official” alternative. Unofficial alternatives, such as Google Slides or PPT files, could be shared, hosted, used for drafting and linked to on the 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/ /slides/README.md files.

May not be the most friendly solution, but we can still allow people to create their slides using whatever tool they like best. Then one of the final tasks before publishing a lesson plan to learn.wordpress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/ would be to convert the slides to Reveal or Show-er. Either way the actual slides are just HTML lists divided by sections and has the ability to “theme” the slides. Just like WordPress itself we can keep presentation separate from content.

It’s probable that it won’t be the authors creating these slides (but they can if they want to!), but perhaps a“specialized” role on team to do before “official” publishing.

Team members, roles, meetings

Random thoughts:

  • First random thought: There’s a feeling of a desperate need for a nearly all-day “summit” to talk through things and or make decisions.
  • Second random thought: A survey of members to see what their skills and interests are might be something we need to do.
  • Third random thought: Perhaps a few GitHub help sessions would be good to schedule.
  • Fourth random thought: Our meetings are a bit one-sided at the moment. It should be more of a team event.
  • Fifth random thought: We are missing quality control in our lesson plans – there’s wide variance in what we have.
  • Sixth random thought: We may need another Trello list/job description/step in our workflow to take care of that.
  • Seventh random thought: All these random thoughts reiterate the first random thought.