These are the weekly notes for the Accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Team meeting that happens on Fridays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.
Updates from the working groups
Only groups that provided updates are shown below.
Documentation
@joedolson proposed some documentation for the plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party handbook, but there hasn’t been any movement there yet. Since Beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 is now released, he and @azhiyadev hope to have more time to follow up on that in the next weeks.
General
@ryokuhi reported that in the last few weeks, the Accessibility Team has been focusing on tickets milestoned for 6.0, so that they could be included in 6.0 Beta 1 (and, as a consequence, in the 6.0 release itself). In the next few weeks, the group is going to pick up with tickets in the Awaiting Review queue, which have been piling up a bit, and it’ll make sure to solve all bugs introduced during Alpha.
20 tickets with the accessibility focus have been closed in the 6.0 release to this point, a very good result. Special thanks go to @sabernhardt and @afercia for working on the code for Quick & Bulk Edit, which is now accessible to keyboard and screen reader users.
Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
@alexstine reported that there is a post coming out soon to track the accessibility of Gutenberg for the upcoming 6.0 release. The biggest issue he reported is that it’s very difficult to keep track of accessibility Pull Requests in Gutenberg because it’s hard to say when they’ll go from trunk to release. @alexstine also reported that he’s currently working on an issue about focus loss after selecting an option from the "Select Menu" dropdown and that his current focus is on some reusable elements of Gutenberg, which will have an effect on the whole Gutenberg project (including Full Site Editing).
@ryokuhi quickly apologized for not dedicating enough time during bug-scrubs to issues with the block Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. editor, despite the Team had selected this as a main goal for the 6.0 release. As a possible solution, he suggested not to milestone too many Trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets for 6.1, so that there is time to focus on issues with the block editor, and to dedicate specific bug-scrubs to Gutenberg in between releases.
Media
@joedolson reported that, while most of the media changes committed for the 6.0 release were minor tweaks, last week he also committed several changes relating to mobile views that are steps on the way towards redesigning the image editor.
Open floor
@joesimpsonjr asked how Team members felt the 6.0 release reflected some of the improvements desired from an accessibility standpoint. @joedolson‘s feeling is that the Team did well in targeting core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. goals, and pretty well in tackling block editor issues, but still it didn’t accomplish much at all in the way of looking at Full Site Editing.
