Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: September 15, 2023

These are the bi-weekly notes for the AccessibilityAccessibility 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 here or see the full meeting schedule.

Updates from the working groups

Only groups that provided updates are shown below.

Team Updates

General:

• @joedolson shared that this team scrubbed all of the bugs slated for 6.4. There are a few that will definitely not make it, but 5 of the remaining 16 open tickets are almost ready to go; a couple others are still pretty viable. And there’s a need to test things!

Gutenberg:

• @annezazu shared this update: Hallway hangout this week: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/08/21/hallway-hangout-improving-accessibility-in-the-site-editor/
• Big convo around the use of inert and exploring alternatives: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/54369
• Finally, there are two in progress features I want to flag for feedback: Patterns: add categories to user created patterns & Global Styles/Typography: Managing fonts. They are still in progress for 6.4 so great time to test and give feedback! There’s also this recent issue opened: Improve Link Control accessibility.

Media:

• This team has mostly finished a couple of follow-ups to the admin editor redesign from 6.3, one committed, one pending testing.
• There are two other issues that still might get completed in this cycle; as well as some ongoing work related to images in GutenbergGutenberg 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/.
• MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.: Provided feedback on the filtering tools being built for the showcase, and there are a bunch of designs being shared in #website-redesign that could stand a look.
• There are quite a few updates in #website-redesign; look at the posts from Nick Diego for a lot of links;
• @Nick Diego mentioned that the updates to the Showcase are almost ready for an accessibility review. When it’s ready, he will be sure to reach out to the team.

Themes:

• @poena shared this update from the Themes team:
• In the theme Twenty Twenty-Four, there are still templates that have not been completed, so the theme is still not ready for full or final accessibility testing, but it moves very fast, so it might be ready at the time of the meeting. The lead devs mentioned that they will let the accessibility team know when it is ready for testing;
• The heading levels should be mostly sorted. One template has two H1 headings which is not ideal;
• The decorative asterisks which are announced by screen readers have not been replaced yet;
• The footer links have been improved but requires a Gutenberg PR to be merged. Aside: WordPress 6.4 alpha and Gutenberg trunk is recommended for testing. @joedolson shared an open issue on the filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. component:
• https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins/issues/419 Re: Themes update – While the theme is not ready for full accessibility testing, that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for feedback; just do any testing with the awareness that this is a project in active development. There’s already been quite a bit of accessibility feedback. If @poena can share the Gutenberg PR that needs to be merged, I’d be interested in seeing that.
• @poena shared this follow-up link https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/54418

Open Floor

1. @joedolson shared that open office hours start Wednesday, September 20th Please spread the word! https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/2023/09/13/accessibility-office-hours/ The goal here is to help answer people’s questions about accessibility in general terms, disassociated from specific issues or tickets, so that the general understanding of accessibility in the community is raised.
2. He’s also started a post about the accessibility liaison/allies plan that we discussed at the Community Summit. I’d appreciate some additional eyes on the post: https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/wp-admin/post.php?post=16274&action=edit. At the moment, I’m planning on letting people set up meetings with me to discuss their team needs – mostly because the logistics of doing that many group meetings would be difficult. However, if anybody wants to join me, I’m happy to invite others.

NOTE: If you’d like to have a topic added to the agenda for our next meeting, please mention it in the comments of upcoming agenda.