Progress on WordPress 5.3 Trac tickets
31 open tickets in the accessibility focus remaining. There are a total of 138 open tickets in the 5.3 milestone. 6 tickets relating to contrast and focus have been reopened for continuing work. 32 tickets in the accessibility focus have been fixed.
CSS Changes related to link focus style
After the focus and contrast changes, the link focus style is a dotted outline. This is a regression against the previous release, which used a blue glow focus. Discussed options and agreed that switching to a solid outline and adding and outline offset of 2 pixels will improve. Also noted that the admin nav menu is using the same color as the main focus, needs to be reversed.
This change will also need to be ported to Gutenberg, and that may not be able to happen by 5.3.
Off-agenda: discussion on whether we have time to complete changes.
@karmatosed raised a question whether we should focus on moving continuing changes to 5.4 rather than attempt to complete this for 5.3
After discussion, generally agreed that the continuing changes for focus and contrast are minor tweaks, and while there are a large number of tweaks, we should have time to complete them.
Noted that while release candidate status closes trunk to new enhancements, tweaks to the contrast changes are bugs, and can continue through the RC stage.
Next accessibility bug scrub
Next bug scrub will happen on Tuesday 1 October 2019 at 16:00 UTC in the #accessibility Slack channel.
Twenty Twenty Status
Twenty Twenty has 9 accessibility labelled issues awaiting attention. @poena raised the menus as the biggest concern, needing review. There’s a PR by @acalfieri waiting to land on the menus – we’ll take a look at it after this is finished.
New EU accessibility standards
Note: on 23 September 2019, the first stage of the European Union directive on accessibility of websites and mobile applications came into force. This stage requires all public sector new websites to be accessible. Existing websites have until 23 September 2020 to be made accessible; all public sector mobile apps have until 23 June 2021.
The EU directive uses WCAG 2.1 at level AA as their reference for a harmonized standard.
After WordPress 5.3, we will discuss updating the WordPress accessibility standards to WCAG 2.1. This was last discussed in October 2018, and was inconclusive.