Get involved

Hello, are you interested in joining the Make WordPress Accessible team? Or are you just interested in finding out what we’re up to?

This page explains a bit about what the team does, and how you can help by getting involved.

Who are we? Who are we?

The Make WordPress Accessible team are volunteers who are working to ensure the continued improvement of 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) 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 technology Assistive 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.

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What can you do? What can you do?

If you want to contribute, there are several ways. Join one of our working groups.

Design working group Design working group

We find and review any design accessibility-related issues, write and discuss tickets on core trac and write code patches for WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..

Contact:- Ahmed Chaion (@chaion7), for more info or join us in the SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. the #accessibility channel.

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General working group General working group

We find any accessibility-related issues that do not fit into the remit of the other working groups on core Trac for the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The 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/ core repo. We need developers who want to help with:

  • Writing patches for accessibility tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets
  • Give code examples for trac tickets (the expected output)
  • Help with the discussion of possible solutions

Take a look at the overview of accessibility tickets and take your pick.

Contact:- To be confirmed, for more info or join us in the Slack the #accessibility channel.

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Documentation working group Documentation working group

We write documentation about accessibility in our Handbook and on other relevant places on WordPress.org. This is work in process and we need people to:

  • Provide links to good resources
  • Write explanations and general documentation
  • Write code examples

Contact:- Hauwa Abashiya (@azhiyadev) for more info or join us in the Slack the #accessibility channel.

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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 Gutenberg working group

We review Gutenberg accessibility-related issues, write and discuss tickets on GitHub and write code patches. We need people who know to test accessibility and/or use assistive technology that test existing and new functionality.

Contact:- To be confirmed, for more info or join us in the Slack the #accessibility channel.

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Media working group Media working group

We find media accessibility-related issues, write and discuss tickets on core trac for the WordPress.org core repo.

Contact:- To be confirmed, for more info or join us in the Slack the #accessibility channel.

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MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. working group Meta working group

We find accessibility issues, write and discuss tickets on meta trac and code patches for the website WordPress.org and WordPress.tv.

Contact:- Joe Dolson (@joedolson), for more info or join us in the Slack the #accessibility channel.

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Themes working group Themes working group

We review themes for the WordPress.org repo labelled with the accessibility-ready tag, new core themes, and review of the WordCamp themes and help with fixing the accessibility.

Contact:- Carolina Nymark (@poena), for more info or join us in the Slack the #accessibility channel.

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Need more info? Need more info?

For any other questions and/or suggestions go to #accessibility channel on Slack and pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” any of the contacts mentioned above.

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How do you get in touch? How do you get in touch?

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 bug scrub meeting in the #accessibility channel on Slack every Friday at 15:00 UTC where we gather to discuss and triage pending issues. We also have a weekly online meeting in the #accessibility channel on Slack every Friday at 16:00 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.

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