Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: September 24, 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.

Design

@shawnandrews, who has been attending Accessibility Team’s weekly meetings in the past few months, has been nominated Design Team Rep.

General

During the bug-scrub before the meeting, the Team finished to go through all tickets in the Awaiting Review queue which hadn’t been addressed before: a few of them still need decisions, but at least all of them were reviewed.

The 5.9 release schedule has been published a few weeks ago. Following are the dates of greatest interest for the Team.

  • October 12th: Go / No-go meeting about Full Site Editing scope for 5.9
  • November 9th: Feature freeze (only bug-fixing from this point on)
  • November 16th: Beta 1 (only bug-fixing for bugs introduced during the 5.9 release cycle)

At the time of the meeting, there were 14 enhancements and 20 bugs milestoned for 5.9: the team will start to focus on them beginning with the next bug-scrub.

Gutenberg

Following discussion on ticket #54075 about disabling the preview of legacy widgets in the block editor, @critterverse created a GitHub issue to allow for turning on and off the preview via the Preferences section of the Option menu. As always, all feedback is highly appreciated.

Also, notifications are now shown in the Accessibility Slack channel again when a new Gutenberg version is released and when the Needs Accessibility Feedback label is added to an issue or to a pull request.

Media

@joedolson reported that the Media Team has been also continuing to work through awaiting review items and shortlisted a few of them that will be possibily addressed in 5.9.

A few tickets are about very old issues, which may not be relevant anymore (a possible example is #23562, opened in 2013 and in need of testing from people using voice control tools). The first step is to re-test these tickets: a list will be added as a comment to these meeting notes.

Themes

During bug-scrub, the Team reviewed a couple of tickets about the Twenty Twenty-One theme: feedback on one of them was asked to one of the original developers.

Open floor

Given the concurrent WordCamp US happening on Friday, October 1st, the bug-scrub and the meeting are cancelled.

#meeting-notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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