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 find the meeting’s agenda here.
Organization of an extra meeting to discuss specific Gutenberg issues
The team discussed adding an additional one-off meeting to address specific Gutenberg features for the WP 5.6 release that require special attention.
Given that there was no consensus on a date and time for this meeting, we will be using our regular meeting time next week to discuss and address these issues.
During the discussion, it was also proposed for the Accessibility and Design teams to hold office hours once a week. As suggested by @sarahricker:
It is intended a place for general feedback re: Gutenissues and to get a few eyes on big issues so they can be brought to light quicker. And to help anyone who needs help with a11y concepts.
The team thought this to be a great idea and are looking forward to hear more and participate. Be on the lookout for more information coming soon from @sarahricker and @karmatosed.
Adding a screen reader announcement to the last block in a list
We finished discussing this Gutenberg issue that proposes to add a screen reader announcement to last block in the block list by @alexstine.
The team agreed this is a good idea and should be tried and tested in a PR.
Adding a sidebar for navigating template, posts, and pages inside the block editor
A concern around having too many sidebars (and sidebars in general) and how this new one being explored looks different was raised, and an argument in favor of hierarchy and information architecture was also brought up.
The feedback will be added to the issue.
The image block’s editing tools break the toolbar keyboard accessibility
We also looked at this issue that reports that the image block editing tools are triggering a focus loss, thus affecting keyboard accessibility of the toolbar.
We discussed alternatives worth exploring and will leave feedback in the issue.