The AccessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (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 provides accessibility expertise across the project to improve the accessibility of WordPress coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and resources.
The WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards state that “All new or updated code released in WordPress must conform with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at level AA.”
The Make WordPress Accessible team are volunteers who are working to ensure the continued improvement of accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (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) within WordPress – both with the themes that power all WordPress websites, and within the admin screens used by site administrators.
Our team becomes stronger with every new person who gets involved – so won’t you join us?
Contrary to what some people think we’re not all techies, and we feel that everyone who is connected with accessibility has something useful to contribute. We’re especially keen to hear from people who are regular users of assistive technologyAssistive technologyAssistive technology is an umbrella term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities and also includes the process used in selecting, locating, and using them. Assistive technology promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to, or changing methods of interacting with, the technology needed to accomplish such tasks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_technology (AT) as your perspectives can be especially valuable when we need to test out some accessibility fixes that have been applied to WordPress.
Each new version of WordPress brings accessibility improvements. The more debate and testing we can do, the faster that rate of change can be.
We focus on WordPress coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and the features projects. We need people who know to test accessibility and/or use assistive technology that test existing and new functionality.
We are setting up a Handbook to provide information about the accessibility of WordPress core, themes and plugins (notes kickoff meeting). This is work in process and we need people to:
Provide links to good resources
Write explanations and general documentation
Write code examples
We discuss this every week in the our meeting on SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. in the accessibility channel. Contact Sami Keijonen (sami.keijonen in Slack) for more info or join us in the Slack the #accessibility channel.
We review themes for the WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ repository labeled with the accessibility-ready tag and the new core themes.
If you want to help reviewing, please contact Joe Dolson (joedolson in Slack).
At the moment there are over 100 accessibility related tickets on WordPress TracTracTrac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.. We need developers who want to help with:
Writing patches for accessibility trac tickets
Give code examples for trac tickets (the expected output)
And we could use help with the accessibility issues of the pluginPluginA 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-partyGutenbergGutenbergThe 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/ (the new code editor). This work is done in the Github repository of Gutenberg.
We have a number of communication channels where you can reach out to us and contribute your thoughts and ideas. Choose the one that works best for you.
This blog contains posts and thoughts from our members on accessibility issues that we’re looking at. WordPress developers also post points and questions here too. To reply to the posts you’ll need to log on to wordpress.org first. If you don’t have a wordpress.org username you can get one via the WordPress Support page and register there.
The best way to contact us is in the Slack #accessibility channel. We have a weekly online meeting in the #accessibility channel on Slack every Friday at 15:00 UTC where we share news and ideas in real-time. Everyone is welcome to contribute to this. Please read the information about joining Slack.
And if you’re a Twitter user you can contact us via the @WPAccessibility account.
We hope to hear from you soon. Come and help make WordPress more accessible for everyone. And if you’ve got some ideas about how we could better reach out to people, we’d love to hear those too.