Jan 29 Timeline

Rachel's January 29 timeline for accessibility work:

This may change to respond to your user testing plans and feedback, so please keep us in the loop.

Specific tasks and bugs are tracked in the Blockly Accessibility project on GitHub; you can use the roadmap view to see the next month of work laid out. If you think something is missing, please file issues so I can keep this up to date.

The timeline:

February:

• Implementation will focus on smooth user flows for micro:bit user testing the week of March 3-7. There's a milestone on GitHub to track that work in detail; it focuses on workflows that novice users will hit in their first 1-5 sessions.
• Design will focus on making the concept of "focus" a first-class feature in Blockly. This is required for both navigation and screenreader support.

March:

• Fix bugs as reported during user testing- Begin implementing focus in core Blockly
• Identify and file bugs for cross-browser support
• Design for complex editing behaviours (e.g. mutators and duplicate-on-drag)
• Finish implementation for simple editing behaviours
• Cross-browser support

After March 14 we hope to have a readout from the micro:bit user testing, and will do detailed planning accordingly. We will also integrate feedback from tests run by any other partners up to that point.

April:

• Formal or informal testing by visually impaired (likely partially sighted but not screenreader-dependent) users in the US
• Bug bashing as needed based on partner integrations- Continuing implementation work in both core and the plugin
• Finalize core Blockly APIs added/changed by this work
• Target feature-complete for launch by May 9

Late April or early May:

• Target release of Blockly v12. 
• Partners will need to integrate v12 to use keyboard navigation after this point.

June 3-4:

• Blockly developer summit in Seattle. This will include time to discuss accessibility features and research.