These is the bi-weekly notes for the Accessibility Team meeting that happens on alternate Thursday in #accessibility. You can read the full transcript here or see the full meeting schedule.
Announcements 📣
Discussion on proposed team restructure
The team discussed reorganizing the Accessibility Team’s focus areas on the Get Involved page by replacing the existing working groups with three primary focus areas:
- WordPress Core and the Block Editor
- Accessibility-ready Program
- Documentation about Web Accessibility
- Several accessibility documentation updates were published, including refreshed accessibility testing guides and an updated page on accessibility legislation.
- The Accessibility Team Handbook is being migrated to GitHub and simplified to focus on team information and contributor onboarding, while accessibility guidance will remain on wpaccessibility.org.
- The proposed handbook updates also reflect the team’s new focus areas in place of the previous working groups.
- Documentation work will continue with improvements to content discoverability, including better cross-linking, a user sitemap, and an updated reading guide.
- With WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 released, the team’s focus has shifted to bug fixes and accessibility testing ahead of RC1. One remaining enhancement is expected to be included in Beta 2.
- Contributors were encouraged to review recently introduced features, including Notes, client-side media and media editing, lightbox captions, the Tabs and Playlist blocks, revisions, the Identity panel, and Command Palette updates.
- The team also reviewed the progress of accessibility work for WordPress 7.1, with 24 accessibility-related Trac tickets completed and 16 still open for the release cycle.
- Accessibility-ready theme reviews continue to progress, though work remains slow due to the size of the existing backlog.The team discussed extending the review deadline, with the end of September suggested as a more realistic target.
- A formal announcement will be made once the new timeline is finalized.Review efforts will continue to prioritize themes whose authors have requested re-reviews, followed by themes that have shipped updates.
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.