alexstine 9:06 pm on September 22, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: September 24, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, September 24, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

Updates from working groups
- Design
- Documentation
- General
- Gutenberg
- Media
- Meta
- Themes
Open floor

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug-scrub will be held on Friday, September 24, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress Slack (requires registration).

#agenda

alexstine 7:37 pm on September 20, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: September 17, 2021

These are the weekly notes for the Accessibility Team meeting that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.

Improvements to the Gutenberg contrast checker

Following a suggestion made in a comment to the meeting agenda, the team discussed possible improvements to the Block Editor notification shown when the contrast between a text and its background is too low. The full discussion can be found in the Slack channel, following are the main takeaways.

Marking the combination with low contrast as an explicit accessibility concern will help people understand the reason why they should take action.
On the other side, it’s also possible that content creators not interested in meeting the needs of people with disabilities would just ignore the issue altogether, instead of considering it.
Adding a link to a trusted resource might be a nice way to educate users about color contrast. This is already in place in other parts of the WordPress interface: in the media library, for example, there’s a link to the Alt decision tree right below the Alternative text input field.

The Team agreed to continue discussion about the topic by opening a related issue in the Gutenberg repository.

Updates from the working groups

Given the lack of time, the point is postponed to next weekly meeting.

Open floor

Nothing for open floor this week.

#meeting-notes

alexstine 5:19 pm on September 15, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: September 17, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, September 17, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

Updates from working groups
- Design
- Documentation
- General
- Gutenberg
- Media
- Meta
- Themes
Open floor

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug-scrub will be held on Friday, September 17, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress Slack (requires registration).

#agenda

Jason LeMahieu (MadtownLems) 2:04 pm on September 17, 2021

When you use a text and background color combination that may be hard to read, WordPress gives you the following warning: “This color combination may be hard for people to read. Try using a brighter background color and/or a darker text color.”

We are wondering if it the team would think it would be in improvement to specifically call this out as an “Accessibility” concern. In our institution, we’ve been trying to emphasize accessibility to our content providers for years, but it’s always an uphill battle. While we love the clear/readable/plain language, we thought that maybe specifically calling this out as an accessibility concern might make people take it more seriously.

Some initial thought options included adding a small heading before it, such as “Accessibility Warning” or just adding a few words to the end “… to make the content more accessible.”

alexstine 4:46 pm on September 10, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: September 10, 2021

These are the weekly notes for the Accessibility Team meeting that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.

Updates from working groups

Only working groups that provided updates are shown below.

General

There’s been quite a few tickets that popped in to the Awaiting Review queue. Only made it through some of them today, will continue in next week’s bug scrub.

Gutenberg

A new FSE outreach request that’s less of a “call for testing” and more about collecting information and identifying issues with theme switching.
There’s some work being done in this PR about a potential method of simplifying controls in the block inspector panel, it could use some feedback and testing. ToolsPanel: Refine component behaviour

Open floor

Nothing for Open floor this week.

#meeting-notes

alexstine 8:31 pm on September 8, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: September 10, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, September 10, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

Updates from working groups
- Design
- Documentation
- General
- Gutenberg
- Media
- Meta
- Themes
Open floor

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug-scrub will be held on Friday, September 10, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress Slack (requires registration).

#agenda

alexstine 8:28 pm on September 8, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: September 3, 2021

These are the weekly notes for the Accessibility Team meeting that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.

Updates from working groups

Only working groups that provided updates are shown below.

Documentation

The Test team wanted to know if there were any documented processes by the Accessibility team on how to properly test for accessibility issues/regressions. The idea here is to document the most common environments/setups used for testing by the Accessibility team. This way everyone will know how to check for accessibility issues. If anyone would like to assist in refining our documentation, please speak with @azhiyadev.

General

There hasn’t been much going on in General with preparations for WordPress 5.8.1. One ticket that did get fixed for this release is #53641: Can not configure image widget (and others) in widget accessability mode.

Gutenberg

Gallery Block Refactor has some nice accessibility wins in the form of enabling each image in a gallery to have easy to add alt text now.
11.3 included the new Dimensions panel to start building out more options there for different blocks. This led to dimension controls being added for things like the featured image block.
11.4 included a change allowing for child blocks to absorb parent block controls. It needs testing and iteration, including trying it out in various blocks. There’s more discussion on how best to approach this here.
The latest FSE Call for Testing led to a number of issues opened around the navigation block and improving accessibility. Recap to come asap.
Gutenberg PR that could use some accessibility testing. Improve file block download button accessibility

Media

A change is coming in WordPress 5.8.1 which will adjust the number of media items that load after Load More button is selected. Other than that, just a few small odds and ends.

Themes

There is only one new theme awaiting review for the Accessibility Ready tag.

Open floor

Nothing for Open floor this week.

#meeting-notes

Joe Dolson 8:33 pm on September 8, 2021

It’s also worth noting that during the meeting, our meeting note taker suffered an unexpected and unexplained data loss in Gutenberg, losing the entire post. This led to a discussion of frustrations with issues in Gutenberg where the team would really like to see a release cycle focused on polishing bugs rather than feature development. We’re aware, of course, that the Make site network uses Gutenberg trunk, which can lead to stability problems, but it exposes some of the types of frustrations people have on a daily basis that can create a bad feeling for the product. See: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210923144804/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RP4X03/p1630687004075200

alexstine 1:49 am on September 2, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: September 3, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, September 3, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

Updates from working groups
- Design
- Documentation
- General
- Gutenberg
- Media
- Meta
- Themes
Open floor

If you want to have a topic added to the agenda, please mention it in the comments of this post.

The Accessibility Team bug-scrub will be held on Friday, September 3, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

This meeting is held in the #accessibility channel in the Making WordPress Slack (requires registration).

#agenda

annezazu 6:34 pm on September 2, 2021

Wanted to provide a quick update around Gutenberg!

Gallery Block Refactor has some nice accessibility wins in the form of enabling each image in a gallery to have easy to add alt text now.
11.3 included the new Dimensions panel to start building out more options there for different blocks . This led to dimension controls being added for things like the featured image block.
11.4 included a change allowing for child blocks to absorb parent block controls. It needs testing and iteration, including trying it out in various blocks. There’s more discussion on how best to approach this here.
The latest FSE Call for Testing led to a number of issues opened around the navigation block and improving accessibility. Recap to come asap.

alexstine 4:18 am on September 3, 2021

Gutenberg PR that could use some testing with all screen readers.

http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210923144804/https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/28062

Carolina Nymark 9:13 am on September 3, 2021

No updates from themes. One theme with the accessibility-ready tag is in the review queue.

alexstine 10:19 pm on August 20, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: August 20, 2021

These are the weekly notes for the Accessibility Team meeting that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.

Updates from working groups

Only working groups that provided updates are shown below.

Gutenberg

Issue on a lighter navigation block experience. Flagging this because it’s meant to explore a better user experience for the basic menus.
PR on Adding a Dropdown block for use in Navigation. This felt like a good PR to review for the team since it’s a fairly big change to the Navigation block itself.
The latest call for testing for the FSE Outreach Program on Handling a Higher Education Header. It would be lovely to get more accessibility feedback on this experience and test!

Open floor

The Accessibility team bug scrub and meeting will not happen next week. Enjoy the week off and we’ll return on September 3.

#meeting-notes