alexstine 6:51 pm on October 22, 2021
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Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: October 22, 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

@chaion07 highlighted these two proposals that might be worth looking in to.

General

  • Today, there was a brief pause on tickets milestoned for 5.9 due to the reviewing of the Awaiting Review queue. It may be worth having an extra bug scrub considering we’re quickly approaching the release deadlines. There will be an extra bug scrub on Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.
  • Currently, there is also not an Accessibility Release Coordinator for 5.9. See the related Slack message here. Please message @audrasjb if you would like to volunteer or have further questions about the role. @alexstine offered to take this role if one other person would assist.

Gutenberg

Media

Themes

While there were no updates from the Themes group today, it is likely time to start allocating some focus to the new Twenty Twenty-Two theme. This Twenty Twenty-Two GitHub Issue is currently tracking accessibility.

Open floor

Just a reminder to vote on which meeting time will work best for you. The poll will remain open until Friday, October 29, 2021 at 04:30 PM UTC.

#meeting-notes

alexstine 7:21 pm on October 20, 2021
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Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: October 22, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, October 22, 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, October 22, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

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

#agenda

alexstine 5:30 pm on October 15, 2021
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Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: October 15, 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

Going through TRAC tickets milestoned for 5.9 in the New Features and Enhancements categories. Will finish this off soon, probably by next week.

Gutenberg

Although there were no updates shared from the Gutenberg group today, this post on accessibility improvements in Gutenberg might be worth highlighting for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. This GitHub Pull Request could also use screen reader testing. List View: experiment with only rendering a fixed number of items

Media

@joedolson reported about progress redesigning the image editor and requests feedback on these tickets. View the comment here

Themes

While there were no updates from the Themes group today, it is likely time to start allocating some focus to the new Twenty Twenty-Two theme. This Twenty Twenty-Two GitHub Issue is currently tracking accessibility.

Open floor

Just a reminder to vote on which time zone will work best for you. This is the new time zone which will be used for Bug Scrubs and Meetings. Vote here The poll will remain open until Friday, October 29, 2021 at 04:30 PM UTC.

#meeting-notes

alexstine 5:56 pm on October 14, 2021
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Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: October 15, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, October 15, 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, October 15, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

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

#agenda

alexstine 3:00 pm on October 14, 2021
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Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: October 8, 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.

Discussion around meeting time as Daylight Saving Time will be changing soon

Most of the contributors in today’s meeting agreed the time could remain the same, but a poll was created to ensure all voices are heard. Take the poll here.

Updates for the working groups

Given the limited time, only @azhiyadev from the Documentation group asked a question about which themes should be referenced in the team’s handbook (in general, the current default theme at the time of writing). She also reported about an audit tool under development by the Training and Docs Teams to capture the version number of WordPress referenced in documentation.

Open floor

@azhiyadev asked what is needed to improve the accessibility of animated gifs and videos without audio. A few suggestions were given, here is a short summary.

  • For videos without audio, captions make no sense, as they are only the transcription of the spoken text of the video. Nevertheless, descriptive transcripts can be useful: they include a text description of the visual information needed to understand the content and are essential if the video is not purely decorative and if part of the content is not available in text form. This is also required by Success Criterion 1.2.1 of WCAG 2.1.
  • Don’t use autoplay on videos.
  • Allow users to pause a gif; an example on how to do this is available in an article on CSS-Tricks.
  • Maybe, show a static image instead of the gif if the user has activated the prefers-reduced-motion preference.
  • Make sure there are no flashing lights.

#meeting-notes

alexstine 2:43 am on October 7, 2021
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Accessibility Team Meeting Agenda: October 8, 2021

This is the proposed agenda for the weekly Accessibility Team meeting on Friday, October 8, 2021 at 04:00 PM UTC.

  • Discussion around meeting time as daylight saving time will be changing soon
  • 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, October 8, 2021 at 03:00 PM UTC.

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

#agenda

alexstine 6:00 pm on October 1, 2021
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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

alexstine 9:06 pm on September 22, 2021
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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
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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