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

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

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

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

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

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