Accessibility Team Update: February 11, 2015

Testing

We had a report by Rian Rietveld on testing results. Things are going very well. Rian said: “I’m getting test results back on the tab order of the post table, it seems to work ok, but they found a ton of other problems, I have to check the current tickets and open new if necessary.”

Pattern Library

David Kennedy told us that the repos are set up for contributions to the theme pattern library. See the Accessible Theme Pattern Library Update for February for more info.

CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Discussion

Andrea Fercia reported on a discussion he had with the Core team. He asked about menu bar admin focus and non-link links (28599 and 26504). Joe Dolson said “the link/button question really requires specific cases; I’m not sure how we could approach giving any kind of global comments on the topic.” Andrea said that he also updated the Core team about the first testing round on customizer theme switcher.

Theme Checking

Joe Dolson updated us on the state of checking themes requesting the accessible-ready tag.”We’re now up to 29 live themes carrying 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)-ready tag which have been tested and passed. There’s one outstanding theme live that does not pass (_tk); it’s undergoing the review process now, and will either be suspended or updated soon.I’ve got two pending theme reviews to do, and know of at least 1 theme that’s currently approved and waiting to go live.”
Joe has also trained two of the theme review team admins on reviewing for accessibility. Additionally Joe has shifted support for landmark roles into a required feature for accessibility-ready themes, rather than recommended.

Landmarks

Discussion turned to the over-abundance of landmarks. The current proposed code (#23089) outputs too many landmark roles. A theme may add numerous landmark roles without the ability to control where and how many there are. Andrea noted “currently, _s outputs one aside (mapped to complementary) for each widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user., nested inside a general complementary area for widgets.” Jared Smith of WebAim recently said “Easy accessibility check: Search for “role” in source code. If 0 instances, probably bad. If 1-20, probably OK. If greater than 20, definitely awful.”

Other Items

Morten Rand-Hendriksen asked: “What is the best tool for computer voice control (in particular, voice controlled browsing) on both Windows and MacOS? Are there any workable free tools or are we confined to things like Dragon?” There is a demo mode in JAWS and NVDA is free. If there is a free way for developers and designers to experience things using voice control it will help them understand the issues better.Sam Sidler noted that “OS X has voice control built-in, so I’d call that free, but not open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL.-level free.”

We finished off by discussing Shiny Updates (see ticket 29820 now landed in core). According to Andrea Fercia there are two main accessibility issues:

    • focus handling
    • absolutely no feedback for screen reader users when an install/update action starts, ends, fails, etc.

About the latter issue Andrea said “I’d like to propose a solution based on Graham Armfield’s idea (see #28892) but done in a way that it would hopefully be a useful tool for developers.”

The entire conversation from February 11 is available in 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/. archives for the #accessibility channel.

#accessibility-team-meeting, #team-reps

Accessibility Team Update: August 27, 2014

Weekly Testing Meeting

For the last two weeks we’ve been trying something new, a weekly 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) testing meeting, 17:00 – 19:30 UTC. We meet in the wordpress-ui IRC channel to share our tests. If you want to join in or just see what we are doing just show up in the IRC channel. Read the logs for August 18 and August 25 to get an idea of what we are doing.

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-updates

Accessibility Team Update: March 26, 2014

Meeting Time Change

We will be going back to a meeting time of 19:00 UTC next Wednesday, April 2.

Progress

The meeting this past Wednesday was interesting. Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter.

So far, we have compiled a keyboard-only report on most of 3.8 and have some data to rely on.

The first pattern we identified from the testing is poor visual keyboard focus in the Admin. Rian created a ticket dealing with keyboard focus. Better visual indication of focus on elements in the Admin (#27173). This ticket is now closed (fixed.) Thanks Rian!

Testing 3.9

We have to quickly change gears because 3.9 is due out in 18 days and we have to test and create tickets where we find issues. A list of items to concentrate on will help guide us.

Contact @AccessibleJoe for details if you want to help test 3.9.

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-meetings

Accessibility Team Update: January 22, 2014

Ticket Activity Report

@grahamarmfield reported progress on ticket 26602: Insufficient information for screen readers in themes.php. “On the new Themes page in trunk, it is now possible to tab to each of the themes within the list of themes found. However for screen readers there may be no audible feedback to tell the user which theme has focus.” Thanks to @joedolson for the initial patch and everyone else who worked on the solution. The status is now: closed defect (bug) (fixed).

Keyboard Testing

Some of us are proceeding with the keyboard functionality audit of all the admin screens. We have a target deadline of February 5, 2014 to complete the testing. There is a learning curve as each team member learns the routines. Some of us have never done testing so this is a valuable learning experience for us. We are comparing our findings before making them public. @rianrietveld has made a test instance available to us so that we are all using the same environment. She also posted about this on our WordPress Accessibility LinkedIn group. Thanks to everyone who is participating.

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-updates

Accessibility Team Update: January 15, 2014

Testing 3.8 Admin Screens

The team discussed our current project, keyboard testing of 3.8 admin screens. There is now a new page on Make WordPress Accessible named Testing, and a sub-page under that named 3.8 Admin Screens Results. The testing page contains a list of 3.8 admin screens and a sample results table. The results page contains the report we are starting to build. We agreed on a testing methodology and 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/. 2.0 AA success criteria we will reference. Testing is now underway.

Other Projects

  • During the meeting @jorbin notified us that #26602 is ready for testing after he applied a patch.
  • Also @davidakennedy is still committed to helping out the Widgets project and @grahamarmfield is going to have a look at the AH-O2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. pluginPlugin 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 which is now on the repo.
  • At the same time we are checking the admin screens for keyboard 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) we will also be doing a separate report on all WCAG 2.0 AA issues on the P2 Theme we are using for this blog.

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-updates

Accessibility Team Update: January 8, 2014

Workflow Redux

In 1982, in his Frank and Ernest comic strip, Bob Thaves wrote about Fred Astaire: “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards…and in high heels.”

Doing 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) dance is very much like that. Great care is taken to make sure that not only do we produce useful reports and code solutions but that whatever we create is as accessible as possible. For instance, last week we stated that when we produce word processing documents, they will be output as RTF, to preserve formatting between platforms. We also said we’d use Dropbox because it integrates so tightly with operating systems, giving our team access to files while 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 in familiar ways. Using Dropbox as a staging area for documentation and automatically pushing finished work, including code solutions, to 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/ seemed like a good way to make our work public. The good is often the enemy of the best.

WordPress

This week we discussed this blog and how we can best integrate our workflow into the WordPress environment. Remember when Drupal set up a WordPress blog to publish info about Drupal? Perhaps we should explore our workflow options within our own ecosystem. This week we started working through the issues we face when contemplating using WordPress to publish our findings.

Tables

Mostly all of the accessibility assessments I’ve worked with, both manual and automatic, contain tables to display issues, reference to guidelines, solutions, etc. It might not be absolutely necessary to display this info in tables, but tables sure help to organize this type of tabular data. We just need to code accessible tables in WordPress. You can read how to properly code tables in Creating Accessible Tables by WebAIM.

TinyMCE and Tables

WordPress ships with a WYSIWYGWhat You See Is What You Get What You See Is What You Get. Most commonly used in relation to editors, where changes made in edit mode reflect exactly as they will translate to the published page. editor, TinyMCE. TinyMCE has a table tool. The TinyMCE site does have a page devoted to TinyMCE accessibility with one brief reference to tables. We’d have to test both the back end functionality and the output of that tool before we can say that it can be easily used with a keyboard and that it outputs accessible table code. If we need to, we’ll work with the 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 to devise an accessible table feature for TinyMCE and it will benefit more than our project.

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/. Template

This page is produced using the P2 Theme. When it comes down to it, if we really want to make sure that our output is accessible, then we should check the P2 Theme for accessibility. This also will benefit more than our project alone.

Action Items

At the end of the meeting we summed up our next actions to work within WordPress to publish our accessibility findings accessibly, and to proceed with our focus on keyboard accessibility of admin pages:

  1. Check TinyMCE table tool function and output, work with the Meta team if needed
  2. Check P2 Theme for accessibility
  3. Proceed with keyboard functionality assessment of admin pages

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-updates

Accessibility Team Update: January 1, 2014

Happy New Year to the entire WordPress community!

Accessible IRC Clients

Thanks to the team members who joined us today, and to @grahamarmfield who reported in while traveling. Just as we got underway we had a question on Twitter asking which IRC clients are accessible plus we found out later that one of our team members, @arush was sidelined when her IRC client “totally choked.” So after the meeting we used the LazyWeb technique and asked @WPAccessibility followers for some suggestions:

  • For Windows, Jennifer Sutton @jsutt suggests Instantbird
  • For Mac, @jsutt also recommends Adium
  • For Unix, Chris Nestrud @IAmChrisN recommends irssi

Much thanks to Jennifer, who is a big help to 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 to the entire accessibility community, and also thanks to Chris Nestrud for the Unix suggestion. Chris says: “anything with a text UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. on Unix should work. I like irssi.” We can still use suggestions for accessible IRC clients for iOSiOS The operating system used on iPhones and iPads., Android, and Windows Mobile.

Workflow

We are starting the process of auditing 3.8 for keyboard accessibility. Reports are generated in the process of accessibility auditing. We discussed how to handle those reports. A few meetings ago @ceo suggested that we create the reports in RTF format so the formatting is not lost in the platform shuffle and we will do that.

During today’s meeting we finalized plans to create a public 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/ repository where we will store the finished reports and other documents as we produce them. We will also create and update our assignments and to-do lists on Github.

We also finalized plans to create a Dropbox account for the team which we will use to store documents to be reviewed before they are finalized. Tom Harrigan made the suggestion that we set up a directory in Dropbox that will automatically sync from dropbox to github.

@davidakennedy has agreed to set up Github and Dropbox. Thanks David!

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-updates

Accessibility Team Update: December 18, 2013

Focus on Keyboard 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)

The accessibility team met today to discuss a new initiative:

  • We will conduct an audit of keyboard accessibility and make those findings available to everyone
  • We will reach out to other teams to disseminate this information
  • Our short term goal is to add keyboard accessibility to everyone’s toolkit
  • Our long term goal is to institutionalize accessibility.

Support Requests

Two projects have asked for help from the accessibility team:

  • Widget Improvements: @davidakennedy has volunteered to provide support
  • AH-O2: @trishasalas is already providing support

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-updates

Accessibility Team Update: December 4, 2013

Discussion about Analysis of what gets into the alt and title attributes when adding an image into a page/post by @grahamarmfield. Excellent work.

Discussion about what is needed to move Create new tag: accessible-ready @sams suggested that we should find an owner and get it in as soon as 3.9 development opens. He also suggested that we look at the patch in #21442 to see what’s needed.

Though we have had some new recruits to the team in the last week, we are still woefully understaffed compared to the speed, breadth, and depth of WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development. We will continue to contribute where we can and are looking for more team members with deeper coding skills to help move some of the issues along.

#accessibility, #accessible-ready, #team-reps, #weekly-updates

Accessibility Team Update: November 20, 2013

The time of the weekly Wednesday 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 meeting is now 20:00 UTC.

A ticket to create the accessible-ready tag for the theme check process has been posted.

The accessibility statement is added to the Codex Accessibility page.

We discussed reviewing and re-writing the Codex Accessibility page.

#accessibility, #team-reps, #weekly-updates