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 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 and find the meeting’s agenda here.
@joedolson mentioned something he heard a lot at contributor day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.: "I’d like to contribute, but I can’t make the meetings". May be addressed with a meeting change but suggested thinking about a better way to handle asynchronous communication. Also mentioned getting the agenda up early enough to have teams confirm their contribution, attendance to meetings, and team updates happening faster.
Karen J Radley mentioned possibly picking a second day of the week for meetings and alternating (possibly Fridays).
How can the Accessibility Team help get more contributors involved?
Joe Dolson mentioned that would be very helpful if each working group point person could keep a list of potential areas people can get involved in,things they don’t have time or knowledge to themselves, but that are available tasks would ge useful.
Great opportunity for some accessibility testing.
Item added so we (as a team) make sure somebody is aware of it and can follow up.
Brief look back at the events from 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 and Contributor Day.
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@joesimpsonjr mention the gratification of seeing so many Accessibility talks at a WordCamp and at WCUS. Kudos to @Alexstine , Joe Dolson and other other speakers for sharing…
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Three tables of volunteers at Contributor Day, which some have said was "the most attended they’d ever seen at a WordCamp Contributor Day."
@joedolson reported that great progress was made on building out a site to test 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. output, but it’s definitely not finished! I’m hoping that people will continue to work on it:
- The site is here, and it’s still open: https://blocks.joedolson.com/
- You can read up on the goals here: https://blocks.joedolson.com/goals/
- And if anybody wants to help out, you can register an account here: https://blocks.joedolson.com/wp-login.php?action=register, then ping The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” me on Slack to activate your account.
The project has already exposed some oddities in various blocks and has been productive.
@joedolson mentioned that some of the feedback I’ve seen about the physical space is concerning, and hope that National Harbor has better physical accessibility. @joesimpsonjr mentioned that he’ll be on the Lead team for 2023 and will advocate for eliminating issues mentioned regarding San Diego’s venue.
Open Floor and Quick Team Updates
Only groups that provided updates are shown below.
@joedolson mentioned there was a change to the documentation on the media block to remove some ableist language. And he made changes to the Get Involved doc to simplify language and add myself as the media group contact.
We’re moving towards 6.1 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, and a lot of outstanding accessibility tickets are either recently committed or just about ready to go. Should finish those off soon per Joe Dolson.
A regression was introduced in the accessibility of the adminbar as customized for the WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ network, flagged by @alexstine and reported in Github GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ by me. @ryelle is handling it. Call for accessibility feedback from openverse previously mentioned.
Twenty TwentyTwo now has the accessibility-ready tag per prior discussion. Major focus now is on building out testing reliability for blocks so that theme accessibility is reliably maintained.
** Thanks to everyone who attended, including first-timers interested in contributing to the accessibility of WordPress. We’ll see you for the next weekly bug scrub.
