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alexstine 2:00 am on July 1, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: June 25, 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 on the new workflow keyword on Trac

Since WordPress 5.8 is nearing release, this has lost a bit of momentum. After 5.8 is out, let’s circle back to this and get the new keyword added. The latest proposal is linked here. A poll will be created to decide the final keyword.

Tracking accessibility Meta tickets

At this current time, there is no straight forward or easy way to check accessibility tickets on Meta Trac. Since there is no focus tracking on Meta Trac, this is not an option to add an accessibility focus. One proposal is a "needs-accessibility" workflow keyword. This would likely be the quickest and easiest to implement.

How to improve tracking of accessibility issues in Gutenberg

Did not have enough time for this agenda item today.

Open floor

Nothing was brought up for Open floor today.

#meeting-notes

alexstine 5:55 pm on June 24, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: June 25, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, June 25, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

  • Updates on the new workflow keyword on TRAC
  • How to track accessibility issues on Meta TRAC
  • How to improve tracking of accessibility issues in Gutenberg
  • 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, June 25, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC. Anyone that would like to lead this weeks bug-scrub, please announce in #accessibility channel.

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

#agenda

alexstine 6:02 pm on June 18, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: June 18, 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.

Team Rep nominations

Last week @ryokuhi wrote a post announcing his team rep term was coming to an end. Since there were no comments on it, we opened up a discussion in the meeting. Find the announcement post here. It was decided that @ryokuhi would remain team rep to help @alexstine with the day to day tasks required by the role. However, if you would still like to step up as team rep, just let @ryokuhi and @alexstine know and we can coordinate the transition.

Updates from the working groups

Only the groups that provided updates are listed below.

Documentation

Update from @azhiyadevev:

I’ve started updating the Pattern Library section on Make. A lot of work has already been carried out by @Jill Mugge and @joedolson. Unfortunately, it requires a bit more brain power from me to review everything that has been done so far. I’ve been lacking that this week with my schedule but next week should be better.

Gutenberg

Design

No big updates from Design today. The team reviewed the “About 5.8” Page ticket during the bug-scrub, but it seems in good shape as far as design is involved. View the Ticket.

Meta

The team found that there’s no way to filter Meta tickets for focuses (including the accessibility one), but found a temporary workaround.

Meta ticket #5757 was updated to include the mockup of a possible solution.

Media

There is one ticket that currently needs the latest patch tested. Add a copy-link button at the media upload page.

General

  • 10 tickets milestoned for 5.8 were closed until now.
  • The Awaiting Review is clear from new tickets, but the team plans to really try to clear it completely including the really old tickets.

Open floor

  • Next week, @ryokuhi will not be able to attend the bug scrub or the meeting. If anyone would like to volunteer, please let @ryokuhi or @alexstine know. The date of the next bug scrub is Friday, June 25, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC. The meeting is one hour after.
  • @alexstine will be unavailable for the bug scrub and meeting on Friday, July 2. Right now, no extra coverage is thought to be required.

#meeting-notes

alexstine 2:56 am on June 18, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: June 18, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, June 18, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

  • Team Rep nominations
  • Updates from working groups
  • Follow-up to the proposal for a new workflow keyword
  • 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, June 18, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

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

#agenda

alexstine 7:46 pm on June 11, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: June 11, 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.

Call for team rep

It has been nearly a year since @ryokuhi was nominated team rep. Because of this, he feels like the time has come to step down and give others the opportunity to run as candidates for the position. Following the meeting, a Call for Team Rep post will be published where you can add your name in to the running. Call for Team Rep nominations

Gather some answers for a survey regarding ATAG Part B in WordPress

Mike Gifford, a Drupal accessibility professional, wants to collect some feedback. ATAG comes in 2 parts. Part A is to make it accessible to authors with disabilities. Part B is to support authors in producing accessible content. There is a huge opportunity to make the web more accessible by providing better tools to authors. Funka gathered together CMS that were popular by governments in the European Union. There was an effort to bring together as many of the maintainers of these CMS as we could to discuss what could be done collectively to implement ATAG 2.0 Part B. You can see the main results here. Find the questions below.

Is ALT text required?

At this time, ALT text is encouraged in WordPress but not required. This may change in the future, but no immediate plans.

Ability to change languages in the editor?

Not supported at this time. @joedolson found the issue has been raised and will follow-up on it.

Can authors understand accessibility documentation? Does it make sense to content editors/publishers?

Documentation is below expectations at this point especially when it comes to publishing information about how to use Gutenberg with assistive technologies. It’s a work in progress for the team as a whole.

Are tables accessible by default or does the editor guide you to make an accessible table?

No, you must know what you are doing to create a structurally accessible table.

Does WordPress include an accessible forms creator?

Since there is no forms creator in WordPress core, the answer is no. There are plugins that can add this functionality.

Can you upload videos with captions or transcripts? Are you able to add titles to IFrames?

Yes and yes. All of these are supported in WordPress core.

Is there any guidance to authors about creating accessible content in the editor?

There are a couple basic tools such as color contrast checking and heading order. This could be expanded in the future.

Any accessibility checking for uploaded documents such as PDFs?

No, nothing exists in core for that at the moment.

Does WordPress come with tools to help test the front-end of pages or the entire site?

No, nothing in core. There are some external services/plugins that can do this.

Would there be any interest in adding any of the above to core?

There may be some interest in the future, but at this point, it is not likely to happen.

Is there increased interest from authors for creating accessible content?

Absolutely.

What is happening to support authors who want to create accessible content?

Find the WordPress ATag statement here.

Is there increased interest to make the editor accessible to people with disabilities?

Probably not as much as the Accessibility team would wish.

What is WordPress doing to make the editors more accessible to people with disabilities?

That is one of our teams biggest goals. Progress takes time.

Has WordPress ever been in collaboration with other authoring tools?

Not with the Accessibility team, but the Security team works with others to ensure WordPress stays as safe as possible. It is also possible that other teams do as well.

Find the beginning of the conversation in the accessibility channel on Slack.

Open floor

Last week, a post about moving to WCAG 2.1 was published but now it has been covered up by other posts on the blog. The proposal is to pin the post at the top for a couple months.

@annezazu reports:

I just wanted to mention List View as something that would be great to get accessibility feedback around as it’s coming to 5.8 in the Post Editor + Template Editor and will be an important tool leading into whatever the Site Editor experience is like. You can read about the feature here and see what improvements are planned here.

#meeting-notes

Stefano Minoia 7:43 pm on June 11, 2021

Call for Team Rep nominations

As announced in the last weekly meetings, my term as Team Rep is coming to an end: rotating roles is beneficial in every environment and I’m more than happy to allow someone else to learn all the things I was able to learn in the last year.

To continue the tradition of having two Team Reps on the team, the Accessibility Team is officially accepting new Team Reps nominations for someone to share the responsibilities with @alexstine, who will continue in the role.

If you’d like to learn more about what it means to be a Team Rep, you can find more details in this article about Team Reps. But, in summary,

Team Rep is a leadership role that is mostly administrative in nature; it is not a Lead role. Letting go of the Team Rep title is not a loss of status, just a handing off of responsibilities. Someone who is a leader in a team can lead whether they are doing the team rep job or not.

If you would like to be considered for the role or know someone who would be a great fit, you have the opportunity to nominate yourself or others by adding a comment to this post. We’ll be reviewing nominations during the next weekly meeting, happening on Friday, June 18, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC. Depending on the number of submissions, we’ll define if we’ll be holding a voting round.

Please feel free to reach out to @alexstine or me (@ryokuhi) on Slack if you have any questions about the role or the process.

Lastly, allow me to give thanks to all the team members, contributors and everyone I had the opportunity to meet in the last year: it’s been a pleasure to work with you all and I’ll try to continue to support the team at the best of my possibilities.

alexstine 8:00 pm on June 10, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: June 11, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, June 11, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

  • Call for Team Rep
  • Gather some answers for a survey regarding ATAG Part B in WordPress
  • 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, June 11, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

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

#agenda

alexstine 7:00 pm on June 10, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: June 4, 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.

Open issues before WordPress 5.8 Beta 1

The team had a general look at how work is progressing towards WordPress Beta 1, happening on Tuesday, June 8.

Trac Tickets

All open tickets in the 5.8 milestone were looked at during the bug-scrub before the meeting.

Most of them are minor issues that need testing and code review, but that will be committable by Beta 1.

The biggest issue still to address relates to the removal of infinite scrolling from the media library (described in ticket #50105). It’s a hard-to-solve problem of backward compatibility, but @joedolson will dedicate some time to it to clearly identify the problem and possible solutions. Other possibilities would be to write a dev-note describing the breaking change and what authors will need to do to reinstate infinite scroll if needed.

Gutenberg Issues and Pull Requests

Version 10.7.2 of the Gutenberg plugin was released on the day of the meeting, probably including all and only features that will be included in the next version of WordPress.

In the next few weeks, the team will shift to test Gutenberg and Full Site Editing more in depth.

The latest Full Site Editing Call for Testing is open until June 16th, and might be a helpful place to guide testing.

Another area where test is needed is the Widget Editors (both in the Appearance menu and in the Customizer), given that htey have gone through many changes recently and are still being improved upon. To have an idea about what is being worked on, you can check the project board for the block-based widgets editor in the Gutenberg repository on GitHub.

Documentation

Documentation will be worked on more extensively in the next few weeks.

The agreed changes to the accessibility handbook page about Working Groups have been made.

The updated WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards were published, just like a post about changes from WCAG 2.0 to WCAG 2.1.

Next step is to continue work on the Pattern Library: the draft document about accessible patterns and anti-patterns is public and everyone is invited to give feedback.

Open floor

The team agreed to unsubscribe from the notifications published in the Slack channel by the GitHub bot whenever a deployment happens in the Gutenberg repository. GitHub Pages were added to the repository, but since then the channel has been polluted by too many notifications per day. @ryokuhi agreed to take care of that.

As announced, on Monday, May 31st, @ryokuhi and @alexstine had a chat about with Mike Gifford, who asked if it was possible to

get a WordPress answer to a bunch of questions about ATAG Part B for the We4Authors Cluster project he’s involved in.

@ryokuhi suggested to reserve some time during the next weekly meeting to understand what the team can do and decide together how to move.

WordCamp Europe runs from Monday, June 7th to Wednesday, June 9th, with a lounge area dedicated specifically to accessibility. Team contributors are invited to join, but no one should feel forced to keep the Lounge Area covered.

@ryokuhi‘s term as Accessibility Team Rep has almost come to an end. Team Rep nominations will open up next week: if you’re interested in applying and have any questions, feel free to write a message to @ryokuhi or @alexstine.

#meeting-notes

alexstine 12:43 am on June 4, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: June 4, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, June 4, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

  • WordPress 5.8 beta is coming soon, what else does the team need to complete before then?
  • 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, June 4, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

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

#agenda

Carolina Nymark 6:30 am on June 4, 2021

Themes team: One accessibility-ready theme under review, no other updates.

Jaindeep 6:35 am on June 15, 2021

thanks for the update alexstine

alexstine 5:30 pm on June 3, 2021

Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: May 28, 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 listed below.

Gutenberg

Feedback for the Seventh Call for FSE Testing is always welcome .

General

Having a look at the milestone on Trac, there are 11 open tickets in the 5.8 milestone. 5 other tickets have been closed. The current period is dedicated to fixing bugs and ends on June 8.

Media

The media team managed to get some key accessibility-related enhancements into core before the deadline, so that was satisfying. They are now turning attention to get some bug fixes in and to test and polish the enhancements.

Meta

A new ticket about coding string status on translate.wordpress.org only through color was opened in the Meta Trac and needs design feedback. @critterverse offered to take a look and provide any thoughts/feedback.

Open floor

@ryokuhi and @alexstine are going to meet with Mike Gifford in response to the following message.

Are there folks in the WP community working on improving the authoring interface in terms of accessibility? Specifically ATAG 2.0 Part B? Anyways, would love a discussion at some time with folks who might be interested in the findings from the We4Authors Cluster.

They will provide a summary of the discussion during the next meeting to keep things as open and transparent as possible.

#meeting-notes