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Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: January 15, 2026

On Thursday, January 15, 2026, 15:00 UTC, a team meeting started in #accessibility facilitated by Krupa Nanda. You can read the full transcript or see the meeting agenda.

  • WordPress 7.0: Call for Volunteers is closed now.
  • The WordPress 6.9 release retrospective is closed. Thank you everyone who took time to share their feedback! Because community input plays an important role in improving future release cycles!
  • A detailed post outlining the upcoming PHP support changes has been published. WordPress 7.0 will drop support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3, in line with long-term maintenance and security goals. Contributors are encouraged to review the post for full details and timelines.

WordPress Accessibility Meetup: Call for Speakers

The WordPress Accessibility Meetup team is still looking for speakers for upcoming sessions this year. Some key high lights:

  • Meetups are held twice a month
  • Sessions take place on Zoom and are live-captioned

If you’re interested in speaking, please review the meetup details and apply using this link.

Working Group Updates

Documentation

Work continues on expanding and improving the Accessibility documentation on wpaccessibility.org. @joedolson and @alh0319 did a great job. Recent highlights include:

@rianrietveld is working on documentation related to web forms, as well as a new reading guide to help users find relevant information more easily.

General Updates

@joedolson shared that with a release date now set for WordPress 7.0, timelines are moving quickly. While there are currently 41 tickets milestoned for 7.0, it’s expected that not all will land within the release timeframe.

Upcoming bug scrubs will focus on:

  • Moving milestone tickets forward
  • Evaluating readiness for inclusion in 7.0

The ticket #63895 was shared and for that the initial testing has not revealed issues across providers so far. While additional test cases (including Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Getty, and iStock) would be beneficial, the ticket is likely to move forward unless new issues are identified.

Gutenberg

@joedolson mentioned that the current focus areas include reviewing new blocks intended for release, such as:

  • Tabs block
  • Icons block
  • Lightbox support in Galleries

The Tabs block, while already merged, has changed significantly since its initial review and will require another accessibility review before shipping in core.

Themes

@joedolson shared an update that the theme accessibility-ready requirements have been largely completed and are now publicly available on wpaccessibility.org, though they are not yet official. He mentioned that –

  • The updated guidelines are more closely aligned with WCAG requirements
  • Testing instructions are more detailed to support consistent reviews
  • A meeting with the Themes team is scheduled later this month to discuss next steps

Existing themes will not lose their accessibility-ready status due to these changes. However, themes that are updated in the future will be expected to meet the new requirements.

Once finalized, a public post will be published to communicate these changes, followed by broader outreach and amplification. Training around the updated testing process is also planned to improve consistency across reviews.

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.

#accessibility, #meeting-notes