At WordCamp San Francisco, several members of the community including members of the WordPress Accessibility team met to discuss the future of accessibility for plugins and themes in WordPress.org repositories. While the accessibility-ready theme tag has been successful, it only scratches the surface of the long-term goals for accessibility in both environments.
Discussion of issues within the plug-in repository were brief; essentially, the plug-in repository is seen as a jungle, and we’re not really prepared to tackle that beast. However, the accessibility of themes is something that we can address, and that’s our goal in the coming year.
At the community summit, we worked out a roadmap for meeting these goals, with a target of making some level of accessibility a requirement in order to submit a theme into the theme repository.
The primary tasks along the way include authoring code examples to be housed in a community GitHub repository, authoring tutorial documents and detailed guides to help authors meet the requirements, and providing training to theme reviewers to help handle these requirements.
But there are a lot of details left to be worked out, and people to get involved in the process.
We’ll be having a meeting in the Accessibility channel for WordPress at 16:00 UTC on Thursday, December 4th to discuss goals and assign tasks. If you’re interested, please attend!
Basic Agenda
- Updates on progress from those already working on the project.
- Talk about timeline for goals
- Discuss written documents needing to be prepared
- Where they should be published
- Who will write them
- Editorial process
- Discuss theme author and reviewer training