142: Accessibility in WordPress 6.9, Evangeline’s Praline Liqueur

By /

In this episode, we discuss the “surprise” WordPress 6.9 release coming out in 2025 and the accessibility fixes, new blocks, and new features it promises. 

Listen

Watch

YouTube video

Links Mentioned

Transcript

Chris: Welcome to the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company, and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin.

And now onto the show.

Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I am here with Chris.

Chris: Hey everyone.

Amber: No, I’m not. I’m here with Steve.

Steve: It’s just me today.

Amber: Chris bailed.

Steve: There he is!

Amber: Hey, Chris.

Chris: Hey, I honestly don’t know what happened.

Steve: No , that was a great entrance. I like it.

Amber: I don’t think we should edit this out. I am telling you it is a Friday after what has felt like the two longest weeks in my life. I am wearing my glasses for people who cannot see me because my eyes are so tired of wearing contacts and staring at a computer screen. I am so looking forward to the beverage that we are about to drink.

This is episode number 142 of Accessibility Craft. So if you want to get the show notes, you can find them at AccessibilityCraft.com/142. And everyone’s gonna notice that all the visuals look different because we have been dealing with so many technical difficulties with our streaming platform.

But, we’re gonna just roll with it.

Steve: We’re gonna go with it.

Today’s Beverage

Amber: So please tell me, what do I get to drink today?

Chris: Today we are having Evangeline’s Praline Liqueur. So it’s been a while, I realized, since we’ve had a liqueur on the show. So this is a I think it’s yeah, 21% A BV, so it should be like a sweet liqueur that is going to have notes of pecan and caramel.

And this won some awards at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition back in 06 and 07.

Amber: It’s a very vintage southern, like Louisiana looking glass bottle to me, like the brown glass. It’s November as this episode is coming out, which means perfect time for pecans.

Are you pecan pie fan, Steve?

Steve: No. No, not really. It’s too sugary.

Chris: I’m outnumbered on this.

Steve: It’s too sweet.

Amber: I’m with you. I don’t super love pecan pie. I like to muddy up pecan pie with really dark chocolate, which Chris is like, no, that’s wrong.

Chris: Ruins it.

Steve: Ruins it?

Amber: That’s what I grew up calling a Dixie pie. So I’m like, you’re from the south. You should know what this is. But he says, no way.

Chris: Pecan pie is my favorite holiday pie.

Steve: Really?

Chris: Always has been. Yeah. I couldn’t tell you why exactly. Something about the sweetness and like the brown butter flavors you can get and if you put like maple syrup in it instead of corn syrup and you put some whiskey in there. Ooh that’s the best.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: So I know we’re not mixing this cocktail. We are going to be drinking it straight now, but I can tell you what is on my to-do list with all of the extra liquor in the bottle is I found a bourbon pecan pie cocktail recipe online that looks, so good. So I’m thinking that’s in our future. You have our bottle, so I just have it in a kind of tall, fancy looking shot glass.

Steve: Well that is super fancy. Mine’s a Hawaiian shot glass. You can’t see it, can’t see it.

Amber: It’s from Hawaii?

Chris: We’ve got a mix of shot glasses. I’ve got shout out to triple eight distillery on Nantucket Island. I have that one.

Steve: Bring back the nostalgia, the Nantucket nostalgia.

Amber: So the last time we had a liqueur, it was Stroopwafel liqueur with Joost and Marieka. So this is kind of interesting. And that one I ended up dumping in my tea and just drinking it with the tea.

Steve: Yeah, that one was delicious.

Chris: This one kind of just tastes like sugar with a hint of pecan and a little bit of like buttery-ness. I’m definitely getting…

Amber: It’s thick!

Chris: Yeah it’s syrupy for sure.

Amber: Are all la liqueurs like this? See, I don’t drink enough to know this.

Chris: I mean I’ve only had a couple of liqueurs ’cause they’re not something I used to gravitate towards. Although at a recent board game night, I did have the Stroopwafel liqueur, like three or four short glasses of it on the rocks. And I actually found that I really enjoyed having the sweet liqueur just on some ice.

Amber: So you mentioned trying it on ice. I actually think that’s what I’m gonna do with the rest of this. I have a glass with ice. I’m about to pour it.

Steve: Oh, there you go.

Amber: It’s a little too thick for me. I definitely feel like I am going to be very interested in tasting this mixed with some bourbon this weekend.

Chris: Oh that’s so viscous, it won’t even slide down the edge of the glass as I’m pouring it.

Amber: Look at the, I don’t know if you guys can see this, it looks like it has simple syrup on the edge of the glass that I poured out of.

Steve: Yeah. It’s like the consistency…

Amber: So, so this is definitely a mixer in my land.

Steve: Yeah, it’s like the consistency of like cough syrup.

Amber: But it tastes way better than cough syrup.

Steve: Yeah, it does. It’s not super strong. It seems to like just warm the mouth gradually and it doesn’t take your breath away some liqueurs do.

Amber: I’ll go first. I’ll say that I give this a thumbs up because I am interested in seeing what other fall cocktails I can make with it. I probably won’t be drinking it on its own, but I definitely see potential for using this with a bunch of stuff. And it is good enough that I will continue to sip it through the episode, unlike the Apple OLIPOP that I sat to the side and never drank again.

Chris: What do you think, Steve? Is this gonna collect dust on a shelf or is it maybe gonna make its way into some beverages?

Steve: I don’t know. You guys are much more adventurous on that part than I am, but it may collect a little bit of dust like the Stroopwafel liqueur did, which was delicious.

No, this is really good. And like I said, it’s not overly strong. I can see myself like, on a really cold day like putting this in a tea or you know, taking a shot of it on a really cold day just to warm me up on the inside. But it tastes great.

I mean, it’s not like overly sweet. It’s not overly alcohol. So I’d give it a thumbs up. Maybe two thumbs up.

Chris: I’m a thumbs up, also. I feel like it’s really balanced and I feel like it has potential to be versatile. I kind of wondered if it would make like a good, I don’t know, fall riff on an old fashioned where you did this and whiskey and still a little bit of cherry and orange. And if this would add a little something extra to a typical old fashioned or mixed drink like that. I don’t know. Lots of things to try. The bourbon pecan one that you mentioned, Amber sounds great too.

Amber: We’ll see, I’ll report back later.

Accessibility Fixes in WordPress Core 6.9 Coming in 2025

Amber: But, all right, so of course this episode’s coming out, it’s the beginning of November and we are getting really close to the release for WordPress 6.9. So I really wanted to talk about accessibility in WordPress 6.9.

We did not think we were gonna have another major release this year back in April, I think they said, “Nope, not gonna happen until 2026.” We’re getting another one. And I think it’s interesting to maybe talk about what’s coming in that release. Maybe we should start with the accessibility fixes that we’re aware of.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, there were 41 of them. That’s a pretty substantial number I think.

Amber: It is 100% worth noting that all but two of these have been owned by Joe Dolson. I know he would love to have some devs help him out. So I feel like we should give Joe a shout out because 41, since 6.8 is a very big milestone.

Steve: Does owner, actually, that doesn’t equate to he act, he’s actually doing all the code work, right?

Amber: It doesn’t always mean that, but my understanding is that he’s been submitting all of the patches too. I haven’t gone through and read all the comments on all of them. And of course there’s a ton of people who test them and give feedback and all of that, which is all vital contribution work to getting a release out. Along with submitting the issues in the first place.

I’ll shout out one of the ones that I submitted that’s getting fixed in this is that the add media button in the classic editor views, was missing Aria has popup and Aria controls. That one’s kind of an easy fix. And it was interesting because Joe, when I opened the issue, he’s okay, I gotta go back and figure out when was this added? Like, why didn’t it have it? And he actually went back and he’s oh, that ad media button was created before these Aria attributes existed.

Chris: So one that jumped out to me, because I’m all about expediency and convenience, whether I’m trying to do things, is I noted that they added the auto complete attributes for first name, last name, nickname, and email fields in the user profile which I appreciated. And you know, both from a convenience perspective and for just helping everybody complete those forms more easily if they maybe type slower or have other needs associated with that.

Steve: One that I found interesting, and it’s actually not closed out for the release yet. So it may get bumped, but it’s, the WordPress core plugin Reset needs to pre-populate the username to meet WCAG 2.2. So this was a new requirement as of 2.2, that if they have previously filled out a form, like their username, if they have to go to reset, then it should auto-populate like their username.

Am I saying that correctly, Amber?

Amber: Yeah, because there’s a requirement that you shouldn’t require users to fill in information that you already have. Because this is particularly difficult for people who can’t use a keyboard if they’re using eye tracking or speech control or sip and puff devices or alternative, like USB keyboards, switch devices.

It’s really hard to type. And so it’s like anything we can do to make it faster for people.

Steve: The thing I found interesting going through the thread, now there’s several people commenting and opening contributing code to this, I think, or at least comments on GitHub. But on its surface, the accessibility fix is yeah, you just pre-populate it. But then you start going, well, okay, what if they get an email and then they click a link to reset their email to reset this, and then it goes over? Or what if they start on one device and end on another device? You know, things like that.

So there’s a lot of back and forth on that and it’s an interesting one. I think I’ll read through it a little more thoroughly and maybe throw my opinion in there, help out where I can.

Amber: Yeah, I think some that are just good maybe to highlight in general, there’s one related to fixing screen reader announcements. If you try and upload an image and there’s an error that wasn’t being announced. Password fields, button field focus issues I saw quite a few things related to the customizer as well. Different UI and accessibility issues in the customizer. So I do think in general it’s gonna be a pretty good release from an accessibility standpoint.

Chris: And Amber, in preparing for this, you noted that at least some of the fixes are being released for older core themes. So one example you noted in the show notes here was 2012. Support image block, rounded style. And so that ticket was about adding support for a block style to a theme that was released before the block editor was released.

And I’m just curious if we think this type of enhancement is actually worth it?

Amber: Yeah, I mean, I’m curious what Steve thinks from a dev standpoint.

I, I think this is so interesting, right? 2012, that’s a 13-year-old theme. And what they did was basically in the editor, all of the blocks work, right? But on the front end, it didn’t have the CSS, I guess to support if you set the image to be round instead of a square.

And so it wouldn’t look round on the front end of the website. So they had to add the CSS for that. I don’t know, steve, what do you think should they keep updating these really old core themes?

Steve: I mean, I don’t know, from a theme standpoint, even from a block editor standpoint. And I’ve spent more time in Gutenberg and creating blocks lately than than I ever have. You know, outside of building blocks with ACF or something like that. From a development standpoint it’s paralyzing because I know this is going to go into themes that are going to exist, and if I need to change these blocks from a programmatic side, you know, I have to have deprecation, I have to have backwards compatibility. So inserting new styles into a 13-year-old theme scares the crap out of me. And doing it at scale. Like I, how many active installs of 2012 are there?

I think whoever’s doing this has to be extremely mindful of the way they implement this change, right? ‘Cause it, you know, if it’s a style that gets in queued on all front end pages, right? You’re adding something there that wasn’t there before. So you have to be very careful how you do it. I think we were gonna discuss that a little bit on you know, should you be using WordPress themes, giving them priority over non WordPress themes? Because they do provide some backwards compatibility, right?

Chris: So the number according to our AI overlords is 60,000. 60,000 websites are still potentially using 2012.

Amber: In my head, I would’ve thought it would’ve been bigger than that.

Steve: Yeah, me too.

Chris: Yeah. It’s still a lot, but it’s it’s definitely not a lot in the context of the scale that WordPress itself normally operates in, right?

Amber: It is interesting, right? We actually, we don’t really build very many websites except for every once in a while we have a really legacy client that we like, and we’ll be like, okay, sure, we’ll help you. And we had one just a couple weeks ago.

And we talked about it and we’re like, this is not custom dev at all. And then I said, we should just use 2025, what he needs can be achieved in blocks. There was maybe a few lines of code that you or William had to write, but mostly it could all be done in blocks. And then I was thinking from his standpoint, it’s way better to not have all this extra overhead or have to worry in the long run because they do still get updated when core gets updated.

Chris: Yep.

Amber: So, I don’t know. My site’s running 2025, my personal blog. Would you ever build a business website on a core WordPress theme, Steve?

Steve: I’m not your typical audience for these type of things. You know, my personal blog runs on a custom WordPress theme that I created myself. I’m that guy, right? I’m gonna build it myself. So I have full control but I mean, you’re right. I mean, like with that client yeah, build it on 2025.

You get all the blocks, you can do what you want, like you get backwards compatibility. You know, you’re not at the risk of you see it sometimes people come in, they make a WordPress theme and they get support for a little while, and then, you know, it kind of dies off and you don’t have any support for that theme.

And, you know, a lot of these free themes, you get limited support anyway, right? You can kind of think about it like, when you get into the WordPress world, you get the benefit of the ecosystem and a big part of that ecosystem ,is Matt and Automatic, which is a for-profit company with a lot of backing and a lot of resources. When you use one of the default themes, you kind of get that same backing. If you’re weighing the pros and cons and the risks of building on something from WordPress or something from a solo developer, you know, you’re probably gonna have better luck building off of one of the default themes.

Amber: Yeah. So I wanna talk a little bit more about the new blocks that are being introduced in 6.9 and maybe their impact on accessibility.

Brought to you by Accessibility Checker

Amber: But let’s take a short commercial break first.

Steve: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find accessibility problems before you hit publish. Thousands of businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies around the world trust Accessibility Checker to help their teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility problems on an ongoing basis.

New to accessibility? Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is here to teach you every step of the way. Whether you’re a content creator or a developer, our detailed documentation guides you through fixing accessibility issues. Never lose track of accessibility again with real time scans each time you save, powerful reports inside the WordPress dashboard, and a front end view to help you track down hard to find issues.

Scan unlimited post and pages with Accessibility Checker Free. Upgrade to Accessibility Checker Pro to scan your website in bulk, whether it has 10 pages or 10,000. Download Accessibility Checker today at EqualizeDigital.com/Accessibility-Checker. Use coupon code Accessibility Craft to save 10% on any plan.

New Blocks Coming in WordPress 6.9, A11y Considerations?

Chris: All right, and we’re back. And there are new blocks coming to WordPress? Plural, multiple new blocks? Amber and or Steve tell us what some of these new blocks are.

Amber: Yeah, you want me to go first?

Steve: Sure.

Amber: So I’ll just summarize and maybe we can circle back and talk to you about each of ’em. But there’s an accordion block, a math block, a time to read block, a terms query, which allows you to query post terms in a specific taxonomy or not post terms taxonomy terms, and a comments link block, and a comments count block.

Chris: Yeah, that’s that’s pretty exciting. I’ll start with the one that jumped out at me when we were prepping for this episode which is one that I actually found myself thinking I wish was available for multiple pieces of content that I’ve written over the last few months.

And that is the math block, which I understand may have some accessibility considerations with it, but I’ve done a couple of posts about RFP prep or estimating things or quoting things, and sometimes they involve providing people with formulas or things like that. And I had to find creative ways without using an actual formula to tell people what to do in written form.

And the math block would’ve been helpful in those instances.

Amber: Yeah, I tested that a little bit. I mean, I’ve tested all these blocks before we talking about ’em. I feel like I need to circle back. I don’t, and I’m curious if you had this experience, Steve, if you listened to it.

Steve: Yep.

Amber: I turned on voiceover and I haven’t tested that one within NVDA yet, but I turned on voiceover and I used so my modifier key is a caps lock key, and I did caps lock A to read all and read the page. And in my experience when I did that, it read the content before the math block, it totally skipped the math block, and then it read the content after. Then if I’m using my arrow keys , I can get it to go to the math lock.

But when I just read all it skips it. So, and I did a little bit of research on this because I think it might be that it’s missing the math ML references that it needs, so I might have to open an issue. But did you experience that, Steve, when you were testing the block?

Steve: Yeah, same thing. It just skipped right past it, and then I hit back and it went and read it. But I’m not sure why it’s not reading it out. I mean, it’s got a semantic math tag. Well, it’s a math tag with a semantics tag inside of it. I don’t know. I don’t, I haven’t done enough research on, on, on this markup.

Amber: So I feel like we don’t have a super answer on this, but I’m planning on investigating it further ’cause it interests me as a problem. Like, why does this not work? And I’m probably gonna be opening a GitHub issue and hopefully it will get fixed before 6.9 is actually released. But if not, I guess what I would say for our listeners is don’t go randomly inserting mass blocks into all your content. Sorry, Chris.

Chris: That’s okay.

Amber: Test it first.

Steve: So what else new did we have?

Chris: Well, there’s the oft requested accordion blocks that I think a lot of people have brought up and they seem to finally be showing up in 6.9.

Steve: Yeah. So for years we had used a plugin to handle these.

Amber: Or you custom coded them with ACF blocks?

Steve: Yeah, we would custom code them quite often as well.

Chris: Well, and if memory serves, there was some other block that people were misusing as an accordion. What was that one called?

Steve: Oh, what block was it?

Chris: Or am I imagining that?

Amber: Yeah, the details block.

So this actually, when 2025 came out, there was an FAQ pattern included in the theme that had an H2 FAQ heading, and then it had details blocks, like accordions, you know, like you’d have open and close. And I submitted an issue and we talked about it and that pattern ended up getting re removed from the theme because I was like, a details block is not an accordion.

And it’s been misused a lot because the details block also had the tag of accordion. So if you searched accordion in the block inserter, it would suggest a details block to you. I did notice with 6.9 with the beta one that we’re looking at right now, that’s been removed. So if you search accordion, it only shows you the accordion block, it doesn’t show you the details block. So that’s good. I’m excited to see this block getting added.

Steve: Yeah, I am too. It’s a long time coming, but it’s good to have it in core. I tested it and it seemed to read out fine to me. Did you test it?

Amber: Yeah, I think it’s good. It allows you to choose your heading level that you want. It seems like it has styles, a lot of different styling options.

So, you know, the other block that I think is really interesting that has potential accessibility impact is the time to read block. Which it basically looks like it calculates just off of word count.

Steve might understand the code on this way better than I do. And it can either show a range, so it can say five minutes to read, or it could say five to seven minutes, or it could show, a word count instead. And the reason why I say this could really impact accessibility is that these reading time estimates are kind of controversial.

There’s a couple of articles we could probably link in the show notes, but one Matt Campbell pointed out that they’re often ableist, so they assume that everyone reads at the same speed basically. Adrian Roseli had suggested that actually having the visible scroll bar or something that kind of shows you progress in a percentage wise, he thought might do a better job.

And then, um, Balder, I’m not even gonna attempt to say his last name ’cause it’s something from Northern Europe that I can’t pronounce. But he had a lot of things on just like how calculating them and even font faces and all that stuff can impact read time. So they might not even be accurate. He used a another word. But I think that one is a really interesting, would we suggest people use this block? Do we think it’s good? I will note we’ve like previously had read times on our blog and we removed them.

Steve: Why’d you remove them?

Amber: I think I removed them in 2024 after reading some of these articles.

Steve: Oh.

Amber: Now, we were using a plugin and the thing I’ll note that was different about that, which I think is maybe slightly more accurate than the core one. The core one to me looks like it only counts words. That one counts words, but it also takes into account images. And if you spend time looking at images but it also, it like counts more time for images higher up than images lower down and like a bunch of that stuff, which is interesting.

So I feel like that one’s had more thought put into it, but I think I do kind of go the read time really does vary. And then also on all of our webinar posts where we have the summary and we have the full transcript, which is in a collapsed accordion it was making read time seem really long that I don’t know is actually accurate.

Steve: Right. Yeah, ’cause the typical calculation right, is like somewhere it’s been determined that the average reader can read 33 words per minute. So it’s 33 words every 60 seconds. It’s just a mathematical equation. And that’s something very developer esque, right?

But these articles really delve into the human aspect of that. And two that operates under the assumption that all words are created equal. And that all words, in all phrases, in all types of writing are read at the same speed. Because if you ever read like, you know, books from a hundred years ago they’re packed so much information into one sentence. Idiots like us from today, we have to sit there and just read the line over and over again to get all the pieces

Amber: Shakespeare?

Steve: Yeah, exactly. And like in the Accessibility Checker we will evaluate your post for readability, like what reading grade level it is. And that would be a great component to add into a readability equation is the grade level of the article.

Amber: Yeah, I think you’re right. Like almost take the readability and average it with the word count reading time or something.

Because for sure if you’re on a scientific website with a 12th grade plus reading level, that’s gonna take way longer to read and understand than something that’s got eighth grade reading level.

Steve: And I think that scroll tracking could probably be a component added into that. You know, like how fast are they scrolling down the page? I think doesn’t the Kindle kind of do an estimate of your time remaining when you read a book based on how fast you turn pages or something? I don’t know.

Amber: I think I’ve seen that in my ebook app.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: Yeah.

Steve: It’s interesting. I mean, I do have an overarching question or concern that do these things even freaking matter, right? And that’s probably why you removed it from our website.

Chris: I’ve never once referenced a time to read. I’m either interested in the thing that I’m gonna read or I’m not. I don’t know. I’ve never really cared to think about…

Amber: Yeah.

Chris: The content I’m consuming in that way.

Other Interesting Features Coming in WordPress 6.9

Amber: All right. So beyond blocks, other new features coming in 6.9.

Steve: Yeah. So the command pallet is extended to all of the admin, not just the editor.

Amber: What is the command palette, Steve?

Steve: You hit a key, like Sherlock on your Mac where it’s like a quick search, and you could just hit a key command. I don’t know what the key command is ’cause I don’t use this a ton on WordPress, but I should especially now that it’s much better.

And the modal pops up with just like a search box and you can search for like a setting or like search Accessibility Checker. And it’ll probably pull up like the Accessibility Checker settings page and you can just quick jump to that so you don’t have to fumble around and menus.

And that happens a lot on sites where you have tons of plugins and your sidebar menu has just gotten so long you can’t find anything. From the accessibility standpoint, it does gimme a little bit of pause because, you know, it’s a modal.

Anytime there’s a modal. Modals always trigger and have you know, an accessibility implication on whether or not things are focused, whether or not focus trap is done right. Whether you start typing and then it starts popping up results. Well, is that actually going to be announced? So there’s a lot of accessibility things that I would love to test on this.

Amber: Yeah. I haven’t used it. At all really Mostly ’cause I guess it was confined to the editor and I mostly seem okay in the editor, but I am kind of excited to see how this will be for all of WordPress for what you were saying. Sometimes it’s really hard. Is this setting in its own menu? Is it under settings, is it under tools? Like where do I work on this thing? So I’m kind of excited to see this and I feel like it’ll especially make it easier for screen reader users and people without sight. So I think that this is a nice accessibility enhancement that’ll benefit everyone.

Steve: Oh, it’s just Command K on a Mac, and Control K on Windows. I will note this. I just did it and my password manager is attaching itself to it. So it thinks it’s a password field for some reason, but…

Amber: Well maybe that’s something you can report on the beta testing.

Steve: Yeah, but it’s pretty cool. I can just type in settings and then it says, go to settings, general writing, reading, discussion, media. So it’s like all the ones you would get in the sidebar. So pretty cool. I definitely need to utilize this more often.

Amber: Chris, do you wanna talk about the next big feature that is coming in WordPress 6.9?

Chris: Yeah, this one’s an interesting one. It’s adding notes to the block editor. I guess like collaborative editing or commenting like you would do in Google Docs?

Steve: Exactly, yeah.

Chris: I just don’t see myself using this.

Would y’all use this?

Amber: So I thought about this a lot because I do QA other people’s content. On our team and also some of the content that we still create for our clients occasionally.

Maybe in the future if this became more doc like, where you could suggest edits or make a comment only on part of a block. In this instance, it’s like you can make a comment on a block as a whole. I don’t know if it would save someone time to be able to go through it. What’s handy about Google Docs is you can suggest edits and then they could just accept it and it would be there. Instead of them having to read your comment somewhere on the side and then go type all the changes.

So like right now, if I QA someone’s blog post, it’s probably faster and saves us all time for me to just make the change and then give them some feedback afterwards and be like, here’s what I changed.

So I don’t know if I would use it.

Steve: Yeah, I mean it’s definitely a play on the Google Doc comments and to-dos and things like that. Just in my very short testing here, and I’m gonna give some grace here because this is a beta feature. But it’s kinda wonky. So you click on a block and you click on the three dots on the right and you go to add note

Amber: In the block toolbar. I’ll note, when I first installed this beta, it took me forever to figure out how to add a note.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: I kept clicking on the notes thing up in the top right. I don’t know what area that is, but close to the save button.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: And it would reveal the notes thing and just be like, there are no notes. And I was like, but how do I add one?

Steve: So, the actual notes are collected in a block editor sidebar. It’s a sidebar, but there’s no design or UI to it. So it looks broken right now and I’m sure they’re working on this, but, so at first I was like, wait, what happened? And I add a comment and it pops up, but then I like mark the comment as resolved and it disappears completely.

Amber: Oh, there’s no way to see like closed comments like on Google Docs. You can see open or closed. You can’t do that currently?

Steve: I don’t know. And I’ll say this is my first time using this, so I’m not a pro user at this, but if I go to add a new, note to the same block it doesn’t do anything like, it doesn’t add a note. So, it’s a little buggy right now.

When you add a note from a block, it kind of gives you the sidebar, but there’s no UI like showing. But if you click on the block editor’s sidebar at the top, the icon and the top toolbar to the right, it then will show all of the comments.

It shows the resolved ones there too. So it shows all of them. So I guess that’s like a single comment view. It’s a little disjointed, I’m just saying. But it is in beta, so.

Amber: I think it’s worth noting, this is in beta, it’s in beta three as this episode comes out, which means it needs people to test it and give feedback, these kinds of things. Obviously I think notes in whatever version’s gonna come out in 6.9 is not the eventual goal for this feature. This is probably like what’s the minimum viable product?

I still have a hard time envisioning us adding it to our workflow, but it’s kind of interesting,

maybe. I have no idea what the accessibility of this experience is like.

Steve: I mean, I’m sort of interested in it at a level of having some kind of task management at a block level to how can I extend Accessibility Checker to hook into that, right?

Amber: Could Accessibility Checker add notes on blocks?

Steve: Well, or a task. Almost a task management piece that’s added to Accessibility Checker, but it uses this notes feature to, you know, as the vehicle to drive that task management. So kind of interesting from that standpoint.

Amber: We need to go create a GitHub issue that’s go see if we can use this in any way.

Steve: Yeah, I need to learn more about the extensibility of it and it’d be interesting.

Amber: Yeah, I think that is actually one of the cool things about Core adding some of this stuff is it then adds things that us plugin developers can riff on to improve our products. So I’ll say I’m really glad that we’re getting another major release this year and I’m excited for it. I think there’s a lot of neat things going. I will also shout out, if you are interested in getting involved, everybody needs help. The accessibility team needs help, but there’s a bunch of open tickets that can still get testing or feedback or any of that stuff.

And we’ll link to the core contributor handbook if anybody wants to learn more about getting involved with that. Thank you everybody for tuning in, and we’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation. See you.

Steve: All righty. See you.

Chris: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your podcast app to get notified when future episodes release. You can find Accessibility Craft on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. And if building accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating Accessibility Craft five stars on Apple podcasts.

Accessibility Craft is produced by Equalize Digital and hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds and Steve Jones. Steve Jones composed our theme music. Learn how we help make thousands of WordPress websites more accessible at EqualizeDigital.Com.