Accessibility Team Meeting Notes: May 3, 2024

These are the bi-weekly notes for the AccessibilityAccessibility 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 here or see the full meeting schedule.

Updates from the working groups

NOTE: Only groups that provided updates are shown below.

Team Updates

Gutenberg Working Group:

@annezazu shared this update from the GutenbergGutenberg 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/ Working Group:

• Upcoming posts: the 6.6 roadmap draft is well underway with feedback and efforts being coordinated in #6-6-release-leads. It’s aimed for release by end of this week.
• Phase 3: the remaining phase 3 related overview issues were created for folks to join Phase 3: Block Library, Phase 3: Workflows, Phase 3: Revisions, and Phase 3: Collaboration index.
• Expanding style variations: Color & Typography Variations for WP 6.6 was created as another iteration issue for work planned for the next release. Included in this is efforts to move color presets into the palette view to better communicate what’s changing when selecting a different color palette from a style variation.
• Data Views: various new issues and explorations are underway including allow users to adjust grid density, and consumers to set default density, add ability to display fields as a badge in grid layout, and a dedicated issue to [Extensibility](https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/61084] (plugin devs pay attention!).
• BlockBlock 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. bindings APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.: Add support to all content image and button attributes in block bindings.
• General experience: a few more general issues are worth paying attention to including improve global padding to be more consistent when inserting patterns in different ways, proposal: keep the Inserter open (meaning you have to close it out for it to close), and a recently found bug from 6.5 with a fix underway Can’t swap templates in the post editor.
• Overrides in Synced Patterns: an idea has been shared for using the group block in synced patterns as a freeform content area (via pattern overrides). This helps work around the limitation that only certain blocks can have overrides and offer an open area for folks to customize.
• Unify Site Editor details view with the Inspector view: questions and concerns came up after the duplicate post functionality was merged and can be viewed here Follow up questions on the duplicate post and page feature. Please add any on your mind to that issue so we can address collectively. Outside of that, a PR is underway to move around wordcount, post status and last edited info in page summary.
• Zoomed out view: Add shuffling for header and footer template parts when zoomed out, matching current functionality with patterns.
• Components: there’s a discussion underway to better document our deprecation procedures, along with a range of PRs for assessing whether certain components can be stabilized.
• Design updates: various recent PRs have been merged to refine the Site Editor experience including, update list view spacing was merged to reduce the amount of scrolling required and adjust frame animation profile for the site editor.

Themes Working Group:

@poena shared this update from the Themes working group:

• The focus style change in Twenty Twenty-Four was punted from the minor releaseMinor Release A set of releases or versions having the same minor version number may be collectively referred to as .x , for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.3, and all other versions in the 5.2 (five dot two) branch of that software. Minor Releases often make improvements to existing features and functionality. 6.5.3. to 6.6 https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60808

NOTE: If you’d like to have a topic added to the agenda for our next meeting, please mention it in the comments on an upcoming agenda.