On Thursday, December 04, 2025, 15:00 UTC, a team meeting started in #accessibility facilitated by Krupa Nanda. You can read the full transcript or see the meeting agenda.
📢 Important Announcement
- WordPress 6.9 “Gene” is here!
- State of the Word 2025: Innovation Shaped by Community
- Updating Accessibility Contributor Badge Criteria
- There has been a rise in one-off contributors requesting badges, increasing workload for reviewers. The team discussed creating more scalable and meaningful badge criteria. Proposed updates include:
- Requiring around 5 minor contributions (such as testing, documentation clarifications)
OR - 2 major contributions (significant patches, substantial documentation updates)
- Requiring around 5 minor contributions (such as testing, documentation clarifications)
- There has been a rise in one-off contributors requesting badges, increasing workload for reviewers. The team discussed creating more scalable and meaningful badge criteria. Proposed updates include:
- WordPress 7.0 Admin Redesign – “Coat of Paint”
- The team discussed the ongoing work toward visually reskinning the WP Admin for 7.0.
- Key points:
- Changes are mainly CSS and UI refresh, not functional overhauls.
- The color palette will shift to the Gutenberg palette.
- This will require heavy accessibility testing, especially around color contrast, design consistency, and any missed regressions due to wide UI updates
- Checkout Trac ticket for more details.
Updates from working groups
@rianrietveld had already shared an update about the docs team beforehand.
- wpaccessibility.org has a new design and improved search.
- Feedback from WordCamp Netherlands highlighted the need for “why accessibility matters” resources.
- Multiple documentation pages have been added or updated recently.
The 7.0 milestone is taking shape, following the release of WordPress 6.9. @joedolson had share the post about accessibility improvements in 6.9
Some major new features like the Tabs block have landed and will require accessibility review.
@joedolson shared that the work is progress on updating theme review guidelines for accessibility. This is expected to be a major documentation focus in December.
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.