These are the notes for the Accessibility Team meeting that happens every other Friday. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.
Revision of meeting and bug-scrub times
In view of the switch to Daylight Saving Times in various parts of the Northern Hemisphere, the team agreed to keep the current starting time for bug-scrubs (16:00 UTC) and meetings (17:00 UTC) until the end of March. Beginning with 1 April 2022, weekly bug-scrubs will be held every Friday at 15:00 UTC and meetings will happen on the first and third Friday of each month at 16:00 UTC.
Team involvement during WordCamp Europe
Members of the organizing team of WordCamp Europe reached out to the team to discuss how the accessibility team could be involved in the activities of WordCamp Europe, especially during the Contributor Day happening on 2 June 2022. @ryokuhi plans to attend and already made himself available to facilitate work at the accessibility table.
On the other side, it’ll be very difficult for the accessibility team to facilitate also a second accessibility table dedicated to the Accessibility WP Theme Auditor, as suggested: the people who were coordinating the project at the time are no more active in the accessibility team and the team size has shrunken since last WordCamp Europe. As such, the team agreed to focus on a single accessibility table.
If someone else is attending WordCamp Europe, and if they are available and willing to contribute to the activities of the accessibility table during the Contributor Day, they can reach out to @ryokuhi on Slack either directly or in the #accessibility channel.
Updates for the working groups
Only groups that provided updates are shown below.
Documentation
@azhiyadev reported before the meeting that there are no updates from the group.
General
The group continues to monitor tickets in the Awaiting Review queue, to avoid them piling up.
There are 2 tickets milestoned for 5.9.2, which the group is monitoring.
There are 9 enhancement or feature request tickets milestoned for 6.0, with two more weeks to get them committed.
There are 15 bug tickets milestoned for 6.0, with four more weeks to get them committed.
Gutenberg
Before the meeting, @getdave shared a Pull Request about converting classic menus in block ones that will probably benefit from some feedback from the team.
@isabel_brison left a comment to the meeting agenda (apologies for not mentioning it during the meeting), asking for feedback on an issue about keyboard shortcuts and the best alternatives to the current block editor setup. List View is crucial to accessible navigation of the editor content, so it would be good to ensure that the shortcut to open it works across all screen readers. In order to include this feature in the 6.0 release, it should be ready before Beta 1, which leaves not too much time to work on it.
Media
@joedolson reported that work is in progress; as the features the group is working on are quite complicated, it isn’t easy at the moment to predict what will make it in the release. A couple of easy fixes should be done in about a week.
Themes
@joedolson reported that he’s working to identify some better workflows for testing Gutenberg blocks. Given that the accessibility of Full Site Editing themes is highly dependent on the output of blocks, this is extremely important to assess if such themes are accessibility-ready.
Open floor
No topic was raised during open floor.