The WordPress core development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:
Improving accessibility requires ongoing effort and this post seeks to highlight some of the ways in which the project continues to make strides in this area. If you’re interested in helping with this work, please join the #accessibility channel in Make Slack 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.
Ensuring accessibility from the start with the Navigation block [planned for 5.9]
The Navigation Block is a key milestone for the full site editing project that focuses on the experience of editing a site’s navigation menu, both in terms of structure and design. This is a big effort that includes how to make it easy to add submenu items, how to create a responsive navigation experience, how to support multiple different inner blocks, and more. While work is underway to simplify the experience for all (ex: reducing the number of steps to add a page link), this section covers three big pieces of the work, thus far, that have had a particularly strong impact on accessibility:
The first is that when implementing submenus it was intentional that they would open on explicit click rather than focus, when navigating with a keyboard and/or screen reader. The changes made ensure that screen reader users are better informed when tabbing submenus, and can choose whether to enter them or not. Previously it was necessary to tab through every submenu item to get to the next parent item. For a deeper look into the behaviors of the navigation block and submenu items, check out these visualizations that provide more context but have not yet been fully implemented.
When building the responsive navigation feature in the navigation block, work was done to ensure the hamburger menu was built using proper modal behavior from the start. This means that when you open the responsive burger menu, the tab is kept inside the responsive menu experience until you press Escape. A quick demonstration is shown in the video displayed in this section.
Accessibility benefits with the Gallery Block Refactor [planned for 5.9]
Ahead of WordPress 5.9, an update to the Gallery Block was shipped that essentially allows you to have all of the tools you’re used to with an Image Block for each image in the Gallery Block. Thanks to this change, the Gallery Block now benefits from improved keyboard navigation and the ability to add alt text right within the block sidebar. This will make it easier to both produce accessibility friendly content and for those navigating what you create when viewing your site. To learn more about the Gallery Block Refactor, you can check out this WordPress News post dedicated to it.
Other noteworthy updates/fixes [in the Gutenbergplugin today]
There’s a lot of high-impact changes that can be overlooked when not shown altogether. To help capture additional accessibility improvements, here are high impact changes in the editing experience:
Thank you to @joen who helped provide wonderful insights about the navigation block, including the featured video. Thank you to @kellychoffman@priethor@daisyo for the content review. Thank you to @javiarce for the lovely Gallery Block refactor screenshot.
Do you have something to propose for the agenda, or a specific item relevant to the usual agenda items above?
Please leave a comment, and say whether or not you’ll be in the chat, so the group can either give you the floor or bring up your topic for you accordingly.
This meeting happens in the #core channel. To join the meeting, you’ll need an account on the Making WordPress Slack.
The WordPress 5.8.x release schedule calls for a release candidate this week and a minor release next week. However, the scheduling for these 5.8.x releases will be changed.
The 5.8.2 release dates as previously planned will be skipped and rescheduled to the “if necessary” 5.8.3 schedule as follows:
5.8.2 (updated)
RC: Tuesday November 2, 2021
Final release: Wednesday, November 10, 2021
This deferral was determined because currently there are no commit candidates. Plus, many commits still need a lot of work to merge, or are potentially too impactful and therefore belong in a major release instead.
Release Coordination
Because the 5.8.x releases are part of 5.8 by extension, all coordination and conversation related to the 5.8.x releases are held in the #5-8-release-leadsSlack channel.
Do you want to see some tickets included in the next release? Check the 5.8.2 milestone: provide feedback on tickets, test existing fixes, or even submit a patch to help move things along!
Gutenberg 11.6 has been released! This release includes a number of nice enhancements and as usual many bug fixes.
Site Logo cropping and rotating within the editor
Before Gutenberg 11.6, the image used as the site logo had to be edited before being uploaded to your site. With the goal of providing a wide array of tools to adapt your logo without leaving the editor, it is now possible to crop, zoom, and rotate the image you choose for the site logo directly in the Site Logo block’s toolbar!
Locking control at block level
Alongside template level locking, now you can lock individual blocks to prevent moving or removing them; you can do this by adding a lock attribute on the block settings. Block-level lock takes priority over the templateLock feature and currently, you can lock moving and removing blocks.
The toolbar of locked blocks will have the movers hidden, and the Remove block option won’t be available either.
Query Pagination uses Flex Layout
Following previous releases bringing Flex Layouts to blocks, Gutenberg 11.6 improves the Query Pagination block to support the flex layout along with a justification option, for automatic best-fit.
Other Notable Highlights
Regarding Full Site Editing and Global Styles, basic support for child themes has been added. This means the Beta Site Editor is available when the child theme of a block theme is active, and its templates, template parts, and theme.json are inherited.
The writing flow has also received some enhancements in this release: the Richtext format toolbar now shows a visual clue for hidden active items and, when using the quick inserter and clicking the Browse all button, your current filter value is now passed to the main inserter without the need to type it again, making this switch between inserters seamless.
Template Part Focus Mode refers to the view that lets you focus and work on a single template part, like a header, and is available for any template part. This isolated template part editing is now accessible from the ellipsis menu in the Template Part toolbar. More Template Part Focus Mode improvements are coming soon, so make sure to check its tracking issue here.
11.6
Enhancements
Block Library
Post Title block: Add typography formatting options. (31623)
Storybook: Remove G2 prefix from the Components section. (34734)
Block Editor: Update react-spring to 9.2.4. (30979)
Move react-native-url-polyfill to dev dependencies. (34687)
Use Jest related rules only when the package is installed. (33120)
Ensure that all *.asset.php files are included in plugin.zip. (34875)
Performance Benchmark
The following benchmark compares performance for a particularly sizeable post (~36,000 words, ~1,000 blocks) over the last releases. Such a large post isn’t representative of the average editing experience but is adequate for spotting variations in performance.
Version
Loading Time
KeyPress Event (typing)
Gutenberg 10.6
7.6 s
38.38 ms
Gutenberg 10.5
7.2 s
38.54 ms
WordPress 5.8
7.9 s
45.97 ms
Kudos to all the contributors that helped with the release. 👏
19 tickets closed during the 5.8 cycle, and some of the remaining bugs are already in the 5.9 milestone.
So what else should happen soon? To help set priorities for upcoming releases, please check out the groups of open tickets below. Hopefully you’ll find a ticket that interests you.
Content and arrangement
The first two tickets here suggest a long-term direction for the toolbar content and the order of links.
One major proposal is replacing the hover interaction for expanding dropdown menus so that would require intentional clicking (or touchscreen tap, Space or Enter key) with JavaScript enabled. A change this big needs plenty of testing early in a release cycle, and the code is not ready for that yet.
Ultimately, a good implementation of this could keep users from accidentally opening the profile dropdown when they navigate near the Publish button. And it could fix up to three reported bugs:
You must be logged in to post a comment.