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 the working groups
Only groups that provided updates are shown below.
Documentation
@joedolson proposed some documentation for the plugin handbook, but there hasn’t been any movement there yet. Since Beta 1 is now released, he and @azhiyadev hope to have more time to follow up on that in the next weeks.
General
@ryokuhi reported that in the last few weeks, the Accessibility Team has been focusing on tickets milestoned for 6.0, so that they could be included in 6.0 Beta 1 (and, as a consequence, in the 6.0 release itself). In the next few weeks, the group is going to pick up with tickets in the Awaiting Review queue, which have been piling up a bit, and it’ll make sure to solve all bugs introduced during Alpha.
20 tickets with the accessibility focus have been closed in the 6.0 release to this point, a very good result. Special thanks go to @sabernhardt and @afercia for working on the code for Quick & Bulk Edit, which is now accessible to keyboard and screen reader users.
Gutenberg
@alexstine reported that there is a post coming out soon to track the accessibility of Gutenberg for the upcoming 6.0 release. The biggest issue he reported is that it’s very difficult to keep track of accessibility Pull Requests in Gutenberg because it’s hard to say when they’ll go from trunk to release. @alexstine also reported that he’s currently working on an issue about focus loss after selecting an option from the “Select Menu” dropdown and that his current focus is on some reusable elements of Gutenberg, which will have an effect on the whole Gutenberg project (including Full Site Editing).
@ryokuhi quickly apologized for not dedicating enough time during bug-scrubs to issues with the block editor, despite the Team had selected this as a main goal for the 6.0 release. As a possible solution, he suggested not to milestone too many Trac tickets for 6.1, so that there is time to focus on issues with the block editor, and to dedicate specific bug-scrubs to Gutenberg in between releases.
Media
@joedolson reported that, while most of the media changes committed for the 6.0 release were minor tweaks, last week he also committed several changes relating to mobile views that are steps on the way towards redesigning the image editor.
Open floor
@joesimpsonjr asked how Team members felt the 6.0 release reflected some of the improvements desired from an accessibility standpoint. @joedolson‘s feeling is that the Team did well in targeting core goals, and pretty well in tackling block editor issues, but still it didn’t accomplish much at all in the way of looking at Full Site Editing.