Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: October 19, 2022


These are the weekly notes for the Accessibility Team meeting that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and the meeting’s agenda here.

Updates from the working groups

Only groups that provided updates are shown below.

General

@ryokuhi reported that there are no tickets in need of special input from the team. During bug scrubs, the team is focusing on tickets milestoned for the next incumbent releases (6.0.4, 6.1, and 6.1.1) and on tickets Awaiting Review, to keep the queue under control. There are already 11 tickets milestoned for 6.2, which the team will start reviewing in the next few weeks.

By the time WordPress 6.1 will be released, 30 core tickets with the accessibility focus will have been fixed. @annezazu summarized in a post on the Make Core blog all accessibility improvements in WordPress 6.1.

Gutenberg

@annezazu shared for awareness a Pull Request to introduce a Browse Mode in the site editor.

@alexstine asked for some testing and feedback on the Pull Request to modify the shortcut which focuses the list view and on the Pull Request to improve region navigation. These are related to the Pull request to imporve regions and shortcuts in the editor.

Media

@joedolson slated two tickets from the WP Campus Gutenberg report for WordPress 6.2: one is about insufficient form semantics and the other is about insufficient labelling and inappropriate nesting of form controls. These tickets, together with the one about text inadvertently rendered by assistive technologies, will be all tackled as a group.

Meta

@joedolson shared that HelpHub, the part of the wordpress.org website which includes end-user documentation, is undergoing a redesign. It’s going to follow the same patterns used for other redesign, but it should get some accessibility attention in the near future. For more details, there’s a post about HelpHub redesign in the Make Documentation blog.

Open floor

@joedolson reminded about WordPress Accessibility Day, happening on November 2-3, 2022. Registration is open (at the time of the meeting, more than 500 people had already done it), sharing on social media is appreciated (the website is wpaccessibility.day), and volunteers are still needed, especially for the post-event video-editing work (please reach out to Isla Waite in the WordPress Accessibility Day Slack instance).

If you’ve been a (more or less) regular contributor to the Accessibility Team in the past year, please send a Direct Message to @joedolson, who will add the appropriate Accessibility Team member or contributor badge to your WordPress profile.

@joesimpsonjr shared the page with the newly added venue accessibility checklist page in the WordCamp Organizer Handbook, to tackle a few accessibility issues that impacted on the experience of a few participants during WordCamp US 2022.

#meeting-notes