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WCUS 2023 Contributor Day Summary

The Accessibility Team had 24 contributors working on various projects during the WordCamp US 2023 Contributor Day. The session started with an orientation for new contributors on getting involved with the accessibility team as a developer or tester.

Amber Hinds (@alh0319) gave a demonstration of how to use keyboard navigation and VoiceOver for people who were not familiar with screen readers or accessibility testing. WordPress targets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA conformance for WordPress core, Gutenberg, and Twenty X themes.

@joedolson and @alexstine led a table of developers and assisted them in getting setup with local environments so they can submit patches to core and Gutenberg. Three new contributors got set up with local environments for patching and testing.

Projects Worked On

After the onboarding, contributors worked on the following projects:

Testing Twenty Twenty-Four

Multiple people tested the new Twenty Twenty-Four theme. Issues were opened in the GitHub repo for Twenty Twenty-Four related to accessibility issues in the theme itself or block patterns included in the theme.

Testers included:

There is a Google sheet for tracking what has already been tested in Twenty Twenty-Four. The theme is not fully tested, and contributors are encouraged to continue testing and logging issues beyond contributor day. Please track what you have tested in the spreadsheet or reference it if you’re not sure what still needs to be tested.

When testing Twenty Twenty-Four @robpetrin noted that there are both block patterns created by the theme and core. If you want to disable the block patterns created by core to only test block patterns in the theme, Rob provided this code, which can be added to the functions.php file to disable core blocks.

add_action('init', function() {
	remove_theme_support('core-block-patterns');
});

WordPress.org Accessibility Statement

Blake Bertuccelli-Booth (@elblakeo31) led a discussion about adding an accessibility statement to the footer of WordPress.org. There is not currently an accessibility statement for the WordPress.org website and contributors would like to see one added.

These are the steps identified to move forward with creating an accessibility statement:

  1. Domain discovery to determine what pages exist.
  2. Discussing WCAG Guidelines and what standards the WordPress website should strive for.
  3. Reviewing existing accessibility statements for similar projects or template sites (such as Drupal, UK examples, W3C’s template, etc.)
  4. Testing web pages to identify existing issues or current accessibility status.
  5. Creating a draft statement in a Google Doc for the community to review.

Domantas Gudeliauskas. (@domantasgudeliauskas) created a spreadsheet of subdomains on WordPress.org and determined that there at 285,631 pages on WordPress.org, including subdomain sites, that might ned to be tested for accessibility problems.

There are several discussion threads in #accessibility for people who are interested in continuing this discussion and work.

Bug Scrub

Developers who worked on resolving existing accessibility tickets in Trac and GitHub include:

We got one new WordPress account set up, three developers set up with new local environments, and reviewed, researched, and patched several accessibility tickets.

Thank You

Thank you again to everyone who contributed during Contributor Day. We look forward to seeing everyone at a future Accessibility team meeting.

Thanks to @joedolson for reviewing this post.