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 had 24 contributors working on various projects during the WordCampWordCamp 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. US 2023 Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.. The session started with an orientation for new contributors on getting involved with the accessibility team as a developer or tester.

Amber Hinds (@alh0319) gave a demonstration of how to use keyboard navigation and VoiceOver for people who were not familiar with screen readers or accessibility testing. WordPress targets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/.) 2.1 AA conformance for WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., 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/, and Twenty X themes.

@joedolson and @alexstine led a table of developers and assisted them in getting setup with local environments so they can submit patches to core and Gutenberg. Three new contributors got set up with local environments for patching and testing.

Projects Worked On

After the onboarding, contributors worked on the following projects:

Testing Twenty Twenty-Four

Multiple people tested the new Twenty Twenty-Four theme. Issues were opened in the GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that 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/ repo for Twenty Twenty-Four related to accessibility issues in the theme itself or 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. patterns included in the theme.

Testers included:

• Jessica Duarte (@jessplease)
• Dave Cutri (@dcutri500)
• Sam Fagan (@suprsam)
• Rebekah Markowitz (@rebekowitz)
• Becky Pendergast (@snowyowl5)
• Rob Petrin (@robpetrin)
• Danielle Zarcaro (@pbwebd)

There is a Google sheet for tracking what has already been tested in Twenty Twenty-Four. The theme is not fully tested, and contributors are encouraged to continue testing and logging issues beyond contributor day. Please track what you have tested in the spreadsheet or reference it if you’re not sure what still needs to be tested.

When testing Twenty Twenty-Four @robpetrin noted that there are both block patterns created by the theme and core. If you want to disable the block patterns created by core to only test block patterns in the theme, Rob provided this code, which can be added to the functions.php file to disable core blocks.

add_action('init', function() {
	remove_theme_support('core-block-patterns');
});

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/ Accessibility Statement

Blake Bertuccelli-Booth (@elblakeo31) led a discussion about adding an accessibility statement to the footer of WordPress.org. There is not currently an accessibility statement for the WordPress.org website and contributors would like to see one added.

These are the steps identified to move forward with creating an accessibility statement:

1. Domain discovery to determine what pages exist.
2. Discussing WCAG Guidelines and what standards the WordPress website should strive for.
3. Reviewing existing accessibility statements for similar projects or template sites (such as Drupal, UK examples, W3CW3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.https://www.w3.org/.’s template, etc.)
4. Testing web pages to identify existing issues or current accessibility status.
5. Creating a draft statement in a Google Doc for the community to review.

Domantas Gudeliauskas. (@domantasgudeliauskas) created a spreadsheet of subdomains on WordPress.org and determined that there at 285,631 pages on WordPress.org, including subdomain sites, that might ned to be tested for accessibility problems.

There are several discussion threads in #accessibility for people who are interested in continuing this discussion and work.

Bug Scrub

Developers who worked on resolving existing accessibility tickets in TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and GitHub include:

• @joedolson
• @alexstine
• Steve Jones (@stevejonesdev)
• Brandon Vreeman (@bvreeman)
• Matthew Farlymn (@matthewfarlymn)
• Kevin Andrews (@kevinjandrews)

We got one new WordPress account set up, three developers set up with new local environments, and reviewed, researched, and patched several accessibility tickets.

Thank You

Thank you again to everyone who contributed during Contributor Day. We look forward to seeing everyone at a future Accessibility team meeting.

Thanks to @joedolson for reviewing this post.