These are the weekly notes for the Accessibility 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 that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.
Review of the working groups’ activities
During holiday season, there were no accessibility team’s meetings, so the main goal of the meeting was to get updates from the various working groups and identify areas that most need some extra help, to make good use of the time left before 5.7 beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process..
Documentation
@Hauwa Abashiya reported that last discussion happened before Christmas and that the group agreed to continue to work on accessibility patterns.
Media
@joedolson reported that some triage was done and that there are some plans, but given the holidays only little work was done. The working group will need some extra help before beta, especially from developers who know the media library (and there are only a few of them, unfortunately).
Themes
@poena left a note before the meeting to inform that the Themes Team moved forward all themes with the accessibility-ready
tag under review.
@joedolson reported that the Accessibility Team and the Themes Team joined forces to update the accessibility-ready
guidelines to improve clarity and include some new requirements added for WordPress 5.5. The draft about proposed updates to requirements for accessibility-ready
themes is public and contributors are invited to leave their feedback.
Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
@annezazu reported about the first in a series of call for testing for the Full Site Editing outreach experiment. Feedback is due by Wednesday, January 13th, but the date can be extended if needed. More call for testing will follow, this one was mainly highlighted to remind team contributors about this opportunity.
@sarahricker asked the team to follow two Gutenberg issues that are considered must-haves for WordPress 5.7:
Contributors are also invited to have a look to the Accessibility audit project board.
Design
@sarahricker reported her plan to continue with joint office hours between accessibility and design teams.
@jameskoster asked for feedback about the desing of the issue about making the block navigator persistent and adding hover indication on the canvas before it moves to development.
Meta 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.
@joedolson suggested to open a ticket to improve the exposure of information about accessibility-ready
themes.
General
The bug-scrub before the meeting was very productive: all tickets in the 5.7 milestone have an owner, so they are monitored by at least one team contributor.
Open floor
@Hauwa Abashiya asked if some team contributors could attend the meetings of the new Learn working group. Next meeting is on Thursday, January 20, 2021 at 15:00 UTC, after that meetings will be every first and third Thursday of the month at 19:00 UTC.
@sarahricker asked to include updates about the team goals for WordPress 5.7 in the next meeting agenda.
@alexstine asked for some extra testing on ticket #52073.
#meeting-notes