September 10, 2026 – Make WordPress Accessible

These is the bi-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 alternate Thursday in #accessibility. You can read the full transcript here or see the full meeting schedule.

 📣 Announcements

Proposed agenda: wp.a11y.speak() announcement guidance

• Discussed creating clearer guidance for when to use polite vs. assertive announcements.
• Suggested considerations include:
  • Importance of the information
  • Whether the user needs it to continue or it may change their next action
  • Direct vs. indirect actions and confirming vs. explaining reactions
  • Whether the information is available in nearby text or is temporary/remote in the DOM
  • Context such as long descriptions, delays, or compound changes
• The team agreed that a decision tree/rubric could be useful.
• @joedolson will turn the existing document into guidance for further discussion, potentially for the knowledge base and wp.a11y.speak() package documentation.

Working Group Updates

1. WordPress Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. & Block 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. Editor

• The 7.2 milestone ticket scrub is complete for now; future bug scrubs will focus on progress.
• Block Editor priorities for 7.2 are still becoming clearer.
• Notes and Visual Revisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. remain active areas.
• Notes currently contains several complex information relationships, with a recent improvement moving from a tree grid to a list, simplifying screen reader announcements.
• Editor 7.2 task board: https://github.com/orgs/WordPress/projects/300

2. Accessibility-ready Program

• A new Meta 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. Trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket, #8427, proposes changes to how the accessibility-ready tag is moderated in the Theme Directory.
• The proposed change would prevent the tag from appearing until it has been approved by the Accessibility Team.
• Testing of existing accessibility-ready themes is continuing.
• The team also needs support with theme testing and administrative/data management.

3. Web Accessibility Documentation

• Work continues on the remaining items tracked in GitHub 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/ issue #85.
• Published: Tables in the content
• In review:
  • Color contrast of text against its background
  • Tables in frontend development
• More reviewers are needed to help move reviews forward.

Contributor Support

• Cheyne Klein’s team offered to help with recurring/bottleneck work and potential WP Credits student projects.
• The team identified opportunities in:
  • Reviewing documentation
  • Accessibility-ready theme testing
  • Administrative management of the theme review process
  • Keeping theme status/data up to date
• @joedolson and @rianrietveld will help guide contributors. The existing testing documentation and tracking spreadsheet can be used as starting points.
• Velda will connect with Joe and Rian to learn the process and explore documenting it for broader contributor participation.

Props to @joedolson and @rianrietveld for providing updates around the working groups!

#accessibility, #meeting-notes