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 channel and find the meeting’s agenda here.
Open issues before WordPress 5.8 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
The team had a general look at how work is progressing towards WordPress Beta 1, happening on Tuesday, June 8.
Trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. Tickets
All open tickets in the 5.8 milestone were looked at during the bug-scrub before the meeting.
Most of them are minor issues that need testing and code review, but that will be committable by Beta 1.
The biggest issue still to address relates to the removal of infinite scrolling from the media library (described in ticket #50105). It’s a hard-to-solve problem of backward compatibility, but @joedolson will dedicate some time to it to clearly identify the problem and possible solutions. Other possibilities would be to write a dev-note describing the breaking change and what authors will need to do to reinstate infinite scroll if needed.
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/ Issues and Pull Requests
Version 10.7.2 of the Gutenberg 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 was released on the day of the meeting, probably including all and only features that will be included in the next version of WordPress.
In the next few weeks, the team will shift to test Gutenberg and Full Site Editing more in depth.
The latest Full Site Editing Call for Testing is open until June 16th, and might be a helpful place to guide testing.
Another area where test is needed is the Widget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. Editors (both in the Appearance menu and in the Customizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.), given that htey have gone through many changes recently and are still being improved upon. To have an idea about what is being worked on, you can check the project board for the block-based widgets editor in the Gutenberg repository on GitHub.
Documentation
Documentation will be worked on more extensively in the next few weeks.
The agreed changes to the accessibility handbook page about Working Groups have been made.
The updated WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards were published, just like a post about changes from WCAG 2.0 to WCAG 2.1.
Next step is to continue work on the Pattern Library: the draft document about accessible patterns and anti-patterns is public and everyone is invited to give feedback.
Open floor
The team agreed to unsubscribe from the notifications published in the 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 by the GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ bot whenever a deployment happens in the Gutenberg repository. GitHub Pages were added to the repository, but since then the channel has been polluted by too many notifications per day. @ryokuhi agreed to take care of that.
As announced, on Monday, May 31st, @ryokuhi and @alexstine had a chat about with Mike Gifford, who asked if it was possible to
get a WordPress answer to a bunch of questions about ATAG Part B for the We4Authors Cluster project
he’s involved in.
@ryokuhi suggested to reserve some time during the next weekly meeting to understand what the team can do and decide together how to move.
WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe runs from Monday, June 7th to Wednesday, June 9th, with a lounge area dedicated specifically to accessibility. Team contributors are invited to join, but no one should feel forced to keep the Lounge Area covered.
@ryokuhi‘s term as Accessibility Team Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. has almost come to an end. Team Rep nominations will open up next week: if you’re interested in applying and have any questions, feel free to write a message to @ryokuhi or @alexstine.
