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.
Planning bug-scrubs and meetings for WordPress 5.8 release
Following updates to the 5.8 release cycle timeline and to the 5.8 pre-planning post, the next WordPress release cycle is now more defined.
@ryokuhi introduced the discussion, highlighting the main points.
- Following the first round of testing on Full Site Editing, the plan is to merge some features in the next release.
- In earlier releases, work on existing bugs could be done also during Beta, but in the latest releases Beta was intended exclusively to fix bugs introduced during each release cycle. To allow specific time to bug squashing, a new “Feature freeze” deadline is introduced two weeks before Beta 1: after Feature freeze, only bug fixing is allowed.
- At the time of the meeting, without taking in consideration Gutenberg and Full Site Editing, there were 17 tickets in the 5.8 milestone: 1 ticket is marked as
early, 1 ticket is afeature request, 7 tickets areenhancementsand 3 don’t have an owner (but the team has to address only 2 of them). - As the difference between enhancements and bugs is now significant again, the team needs to decide how to prioritize work, given that until now bug-scrubs focused mainly on tickets in the Awaiting Review queue and that new features or enhancements should be ready by May 25.
A discussion followed about how to prioritize work so that all tickets marked for 5.8 will make it in the release.
The main decision was to have to two checkpoints on April 30 (right after the second Go / No Go test on Full Site Editing) and on May 21, to better keep track of what areas need more help and to decide if extra meetings or bug-scrubs are needed.
Also, in the next weeks bug-scrubs will gradually move from focusing on Awaiting Review, to Feature Requests and Enhancements, and then to Bugs and Tasks.
Updates from working groups
Only groups which had updates shared them.
Gutenberg
@annezazu shared a few updates about Full Site Editing and Gutenberg in general.
- The call for testing on the Query Block was shipped with feedback due by May 5: as the block will almost certainly be included in 5.8, contributors are invited to test for accessibility concerns as soon as possible.
- The post about the first Go / No Go test helps to understand the major areas of focus for Full Site Editing in 5.8, so it can be an interesting reading. According to the post, the main areas in need of tests are template editing and major blocks like the Navigation Block and the Query Block.
- A Pull Request to add block titles to the block switcher label will be included in version 10.5 of the plugin.
- The Pull Request about focusing the save button when the save panel opens might need some extra feedback.
Documentation
@Jill Mugge reported that the working group is adding more accessible patterns and antipatterns. During the meeting, she suggested that creating a template for documentation could be helpful to stay consistent and improve accessibility, so she volunteered to do it.
Media
@joedolson reported that he did some work and that he should make more progress by next week.
Open floor
A clarification was given about why threads should be avoided on Slack.