Accessibility Team Meeting notes: Feb. 22, 2019

Meeting notes on Slack

Uniform Search Planning (#31818)

• Start advance planning on unifying search UI – targeting 5.3
• Focus on primary search interfaces (posts, comments, users, themes, plugins, etc.) first, but consider Gutenberg searches as well
• Aim to reduce from 5 distinct search UIs to max of 2
• Search is handled variably in PHP & JS, JS is in jQuery, backbone, and React in different contexts.
• @ryanshoover proposed an ES6 class usable in all JS contexts.
• Will begin by listing requirements (@joedolson)

Update on User Handbook

• Still no updates anywhere. No idea what’s happening here.

Prioritize Gutenberg A11y issues for 5.2

• Set working meeting to triage the 122 current Gutenberg a11y issues to identify priorities for WP 5.2
• @ryelle, @greatislander, @sami.keijonen, @afercia, and @joedolson will find a time to triage and create a priority spreadsheet.

Issues for Discussion

#13900: Replace placeholder with label

• Definitely in favor of principle
• Proposed design seems fine, as long as it’s consistently applied; we didn’t see any specific concerns with the proposal.

#13688: Surface keyboard shortcuts visibly

• Intriguing idea
• Could be helpful for helping people remember shortcuts
• Visual only; screen reader users already have audio reminders of shortcuts
• Probably not a priority, but this could be useful.

#13663: Improve keyboard navigation between the block inspector and block

• Solution keeps being proposed to have the sidebar toggle shift focus to the inspector; these functions need to be separate.
• If the toggle shifts focus, it means there is no option for sighted users to view the inspector settings without being forced out of their current context