Update November 24, 2022: Meetup.com requested that we update the “Next Steps” portion to focus on feedback around accessibility of their platform broadly, instead of the accessibility overlay, as that is no longer in place.
In recent weeks, WordPress meetup organizers expressed their disappointment in Meetup.com’s new accessibility overlay, and brought this to the attention of the Community Team. Since then, @peiraisotta and I met with Meetup’s Director of Engineering, their Head of Customer Success, and their GM of Meetup Pro.
Meetup.com was very receptive to our feedback, and they have removed the accessibility overlay.
Here are some additional notes from our chat.
Meetup was working with EqualWeb. EqualWeb’s widget does scan for accessibility issues, and the original plan was for EqualWeb’s team (real people!) to provide progressive fixes to the overlay. Meetup’s hope was to provide, over time, a fully accessible overlay.
In this meeting, Isotta and I provided our feedback on accessibility overlays. At a high level, our main points were:
- Overlays create a poor user experience for people who use assistive technology and may ignore key WCAG issues
- There are increasing legal and privacy concerns associated with accessibility overlays
- Overlays do not provide equal and open access to a platform
While it was great to hear that the solutions that Meetup.com hoped to apply will be people-driven, and not automated solutions, it would be to the overlay. In this case, the Community team recommended that those changes be made to Meetup.com’s source code to provide an improved experience for everyone.
Next steps
As part of Meetup.com’s accessibility roadmap, they would value hearing from WordPress community members. If you have experience using Meetup, especially across across all platforms (web, mobile web, apps, etc.), from an accessibility standpoint, have 50 min in coming weeks, and are interested in speaking with Meetup around which parts of their website/features we would like them to prioritize, please let us know, either in the comments, or by pinging @angelasjin or @peiraisotta.
Major kudos to Bet Hannon, Joe Simpson, and Sumner Davenport, accessibility allies who raised the issue with the Community team and helped us prepare for the conversation with Meetup.com.