What does the Accessibility Team do in WordPress?
We support the needs of people with disabilities across the entire project. This can range from training and teaching, consulting on specific development projects, testing features, and contributing code to core. With such a broad scope of needs, the accessibility team is always in need of more people to participate.
There’s no need to know code or accessibility to contribute to the accessibility team! An important part of what we do is help developers better understand how they can create more accessible code; so if you’re an experienced developer who wants to know more about accessibility, come chat with us!
If you don’t know code, but want to contribute, we’ve got ways for you to help as well – documentation and testing are always ongoing needs for our team.
What should I do to prepare to contribute?
The WordPress core team has already posted a lot of information on preparing for contributor day, and a lot of that is equally relevant for you. If you’re not a developer and don’t intend to test new code, you may not need to go through the whole process of setting up a local development environment. However, testing upcoming changes in WordPress does require a development environment where you can apply patches and pull requests for WordPress and for Gutenberg.
However, testing isn’t just about new features. The WordPress.org site itself needs ongoing review and testing, and the code that already exists in WordPress can always be improved.
Find us at WordCamp Europe!
Both Joe Dolson (@joedolson) and Stefan Minoia (@ryokuhi) will be present to coordinate accessibility contributors at WordCamp EU’s contributor day, and we’re looking forward to chatting with you about anything to do with WordPress and Accessibility! We can set you up with a task, answer questions, or start to teach you accessibility testing processes.
See you soon!