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.
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 A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts..
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 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. 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 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/
Following discussion on ticket #54075 about disabling the preview of legacy widgets in the block Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. 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 Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. 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 WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US happening on Friday, October 1st, the bug-scrub and the meeting are cancelled.