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by laken 2906 days ago
I'm a contributor to the WordPress A11y team, and trust us, we are trying. It's an a11y nightmare, and the majority of contributors to Gutenberg seem to not care. The goal is for it to meet WCAG 2.0 on merge, but that's running close. The majority of Gutenberg contributors think of the a11y issues as "low priority."

Because you sound like you know a bit about a11y, we could really use a hand. Accessibility meetings are weekly in the Make WordPress.org Slack instance. One of the problems is that Gutenberg's technology is very different than the rest of WordPress core, so some of the a11y contributors to WordPress Core are staying away from code-contributions to Gutenberg because of that (myself included). I've been playing around with node.js a bit to try and contribute, but it's very different than what I'm used to (PHP).
1 comments
sodosopa 2903 days ago
Thanks for the response. I think most web devs have always treated accessibility as "low priority". It's not top of mind until it becomes a part of your daily job. I've been there.

How close is it to 2.0 A, currently?

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laken 2902 days ago
It's tricky to even tell now, unfortunately.

These are the issues that are remaining that we (the a11y team) want fixed prior to merge: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is...

When these issues were added to the merge proposal, they were what were left for 2.0 level A. But accessibility regressions have gotten introduced many times now while other developers are working on things from other merge proposals. We were doing some tests with users of various assistive technologies, and these were also the problem areas for them.

Here are the open a11y issues for Gutenberg in general: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues?page=1&q=is%3A...

A lot of these are still quite important. The UI is also super confusing, as it's an entirely new type of UI, and it's confusing to figure out where everything is if you can't see it. We are working on some documentation that describes it for assistive-technology users, as it's virtually impossible for them to infer how it works.

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sodosopa 2902 days ago
from earlier today "WordPress aims to make the WordPress Admin and bundled themes fully WCAG 2.0 AA compliant where possible."

https://wordpress.org/about/accessibility/

The jump from A to AA is difficult and to put the statement of AA out there, is bold (and probably naive).

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laken 2901 days ago
Yes, that’s our new accessibility page!

I’ve heard the argument by many though that if someone needs WCAG AA, that they can just use the classic editor (which will be supported via a plugin maintained by wp.org). Will be interesting to see how it all plays out

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