Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: March 15, 2024

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

NOTE: Only groups that provided updates are shown below.

Team Updates

General Working Group:

• @joedolson shared that he’ll continue to work his way through the backlog of issues on tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.; mostly finished with tickets awaiting review, and aiming to get a lot done in 6.6.

Gutenberg Working Group:

@annezazu shared this update from the 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/ Working Group:

• Zoomed out view tracking issue has been edited to add more individual tasks and items. This is an area to pay attention to as work is beginning to revisit this option and how it interacts with things like patterns.
• DataViews: Forms overview issue to discuss how to unify the various forms created like inspector panels or detail pages.
• WIP: Advancing site editor index views issue that showcases follow up work to the data views for pages and templates.
• WordPress 6.5 – Data Views accessibility audit issue to capture feedback coming from the 6.5 release of data views to help focus next steps for 6.6.

Joe commmented that the data views will need some attention, since they’re going to be important in the next gen admin.

Meta Working Group:

@Blake (Equalify) is working on a project to bulk assess the accessibility of .org properties.

Open Floor for Discussion:

• Joe asked for everybody take time to look at WordPress 6.5. While major changes are out of scope at this point, if you find minor accessibility issues, those can still be fixed. Work on 6.6 is already started, so don’t hesitate to participate on issues milestoned for that, as well. 6.6 is intended as a polish and maintenance release, which is a great opportunity to focus on fixing issues instead of chasing features, so this is a very important release for our team.

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