WordPress 6.0 Accessibility Improvements

Thank you to @joedolson and @alexstine for collaborating on this post. 

Improving 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) requires ongoing effort and this post seeks to highlight some of the ways in which the project has taken action in this area of work for WordPress 6.0, set to release May 24th, 2022. If you’re interested in helping with this work, please join the #accessibility channel in Make SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. and check out how you can get involved. There’s plenty of important work to be done including testing, giving accessibility feedback, and creating PRs to address feedback. 

General improvements

Some improvements didn’t fit nicely into a specific area and instead impacted the general experience of using WordPress. This includes everything from adding button text labels to the site editor to displaying the 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. title when removing a block:

Navigation block

While the first version of the navigation block that landed in 5.9 ensured many key accessibility features from the start, more work has been done to refine the experience and to ensure changes to the UIUI User interface continue to include accessibility features: 

Block improvements

Beyond the navigation block, various additional blocks received updates to improve their respective accessibility, wherever they are used: 

List View

List View continues to be an important tool, especially in a full site editing world, allowing folks to quickly navigate between complex content. In this release, tons of work was done to allow it to be more high impact for more people:

Media 

Expect various aspects of managing media to have updates from adding a “Copy URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org to clipboard” option to make it simpler to get the URL you need to ensuring the full permalink for an image is visible when on mobile devices. 

Quick/Bulk Edit

Quick/Bulk editing has a few improvements that significantly improve keyboard and screen reader operability:

Login and Registration

The login and registration fields now properly set valid autocomplete attributes with a fix to the generate password button that was misleading: 

Themes

A few fixes are in place for various default themes and the overall process of hovering over theme details now has more consistency: 

#6-0, #accessibility, #dev-notes

#dev-notes-6-0