WordPress 7.0 is here, and this episode of Accessibility Craft dives into what changed, what accessibility improvements made the release, and why the new admin color updates sparked so much debate in the WordPress community.
Amber, Chris, and Steve recap the team’s GAAD 2026 Contributor Day work, including accessibility-ready theme testing, Gutenberg improvements, new automation tooling, and Core accessibility updates.
They also dig into practical WordPress 7.0 highlights like improved tab behavior, better media modal keyboard interaction, IPTC alt text imports, decorative image handling in the Image block, and the new AI layer that has developers asking serious security questions.
Before all that, the crew tests Batchwell dry cocktail mixes, including mojito, whiskey sour, and spicy margarita flavors. The verdict: surprisingly good, very portable, slightly dusty, and apparently a little risky if you inhale the margarita powder.
Episode Outline
- Batchwell dry cocktail mix taste test with mojito, whiskey sour, and spicy margarita flavor reactions
- A packaging QR code fail with a huge redirect chain
- GAAD 2026 Contributor Day results and pledge totals
- WordPress 7.0 release timing and community reactions
- The new WordPress admin color scheme debate
- Accessibility enhancements and fixes in WordPress 7.0
- Why old Trac tickets can be so hard to resolve
- WordPress 7.0’s AI integration layer and security considerations
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Batchwell Cocktail Dry Mix
- WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” release post
- WordPress 7.0 tickets with accessibility focus
- WordPress 7.0 tickets owned by Joe Dolson
Tune in to Accessibility Craft conversation episodes like this one every other Monday.
Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible through their work.
To learn more about us, you can visit our website.
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Transcript
Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.
Grab a drink, the show starts now!
Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber, and I am here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey everybody.
Amber: And Steve.
Steve Jones: Hello everyone.
Amber: And this is episode number 166 of the Accessibility Craft podcast, which means you can find show notes and a full transcript if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/166. We start every episode with beverage. What are we drinking today, Chris?
Today’s Beverage
Chris: We have an interactive beverage today. So we are trying dry cocktail mix packets, which you can mix with just water or the liquor of your choosing plus some water. So the instructions are to get a glass of ice and then a separate glass with either three shots of water or one shot of liquor and two shots of water. And you stir everything together in one glass, and then you pour it over your ice cube.
So I think we’re all set up. So I’ve got my ice.
Amber: You forgot to say you’ve got your ice in your WordPress highball glass.
Chris: Yes.
Amber: From WordCamp US in Philadelphia.
Chris: The OG WordCamp US.
Amber: ‘Cause we’re nerds.
Chris: I’m gonna try to get this on camera. We’ll see. So we’re gonna go in and try not to spill too much. Hard to pour out of shot glasses. I’m gonna have to clean my desk off after this. And then packet.
Amber: What flavor are you doing, Chris?
Chris: I’m doing mojito, so that was a, that was a shot of rum. Shout out to our content specialist, Paola, for the rum, which she also gave us at a WordCamp US in DC. Wow, it really smells like mint. I’ve got the mojito mix in there, doing a bit of a stir.
Amber: This is how you can tell we don’t drink cocktails, because we don’t have a shaker.
Chris: Yep.
Steve Jones: Or, or…
Chris: It says you can stir it. It doesn’t say you have to shake it.
Amber: Probably ’cause most people don’t actually have shakers.
Chris: Yeah. I’m not sure if that’s, if I can get that on camera, but there’s, there’s like stuff that isn’t mixing in at the bottom. I’m gonna trying here.
Amber: I wonder if it would’ve mixed better if you mixed it with the liquor first. If it would’ve, like, burned it.
Chris: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe.
Amber: So I have the whiskey sour. Which says it’s got organic blue agave powder, citric acid, lemon juice, monk fruit, natural flavors. Which makes me wonder, do you think it’s gonna be blue when it comes out? Is that… Is, is blue agave actually blue? All right.
So I like this. It’s like a science experiment or something. I don’t know.
Chris: Yep.
Amber: Whiskey plus water.
Chris: What’s nice is that that stuff that didn’t mix stayed at the bottom of the glass that I poured it out of, so it…
Steve Jones: Oh…
Chris: … didn’t end up in my actual drink, drink.
Steve Jones: Okay
Amber: I’m shaking mine first to see if that will help it.
Steve Jones: They’re real dusty. I’m about to sneeze from opening mine.
Amber: You’re not supposed to inhale the powder, Steve.
Steve Jones: Yeah, I’m snorting margarita mix.
Amber: And you got the spicy one. That would hurt.
Steve Jones: I, I think that’s why I’m about to sneeze.
Amber: Oh, mine smells kinda orangey. I guess that’s the way a whiskey sour would smell.
Chris: Yeah.
Steve Jones: So I’m trying the non-alcoholic, so just three shots of water. I don’t have a fancy highball glass like you guys, but…
Amber: You’re gonna drink spicy water.
Steve Jones: Spicy water.
Chris: Well, I’ll give, I’ll give my initial impressions here while y’all mix. I get a little bit of mint. I get some citrusy type flavor, which is nice. It did tell me to mix with soda, but we didn’t have any soda water, so I have a still mojito and not a sparkling mojito. And I also think this is the wrong kind of rum, ’cause I don’t think you’re supposed to use, like, brown rum with a mojito. I think you’re supposed to use white rum. Not a mixologist, so don’t at me bartenders that are listening to this if I am wrong, but…
Amber: I didn’t even know there was a such thing as white rum, so you’re ahead of me.
Chris: It’s nice. I’m not really sure how to describe this, but it’s like you can kind of tell that it’s from a mix. Like, it doesn’t taste as fresh as if you had, like, muddled the mint and added the citrus juice, right? But I guess that’s to be expected, but it’s not an unpleasant flavor.
It masks the alcohol. Mine has the rum in it, and that rum is strong. And I’m not really getting, like, a lot of alcohol burn. It feels pretty balanced. Overall, I- I’m gonna say this is pretty, pretty darn good. You tasted any yet, Amber? Oh, you’re about to do your pour.
Amber: No, I’m showing you that I think I successfully got all the chunks of powder mixed.
Chris: Oh, good.
Amber: I muted myself and I did some very vigorous stirring. So now I’m gonna pour it over my ice cube, and then I’ll let you know what I think. Steve, you, you seem like you’re being very serious right there.
Steve Jones: Mixing. It’s hard to get it all, all mixed in.
Amber: So this is how the whiskey sour looks. It’s not blue. I guess blue agave’s a lie. It’s not actually blue. I’m gonna taste it. We’ll see. It’s not bad.
Steve Jones: No?
Amber: It is a little bit sweeter than I expected it to be. But it has a decent, like, orange flavor, and it has a little bit of the sour. And yeah, like you said, Chris, it does a good job of like, covering the alcohol or taking the bite out.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber: If you wanted it to be stronger, you just put a little less water, I guess, maybe.
But it’s not bad. Maybe, yeah, I don’t know
Chris: If you’re, if you’re just a person who doesn’t wanna mess around with figuring out the right ratios for a mixed drink and figuring out, you know, how much lime do I put in? How much mint do I put in? You know, all that. If you can just remember two to one watered alcohol and one packet of this on some ice and you’re good, like, that’s a, that’s a solid value proposition.
Steve Jones: Having a real hard time getting mine to, like, mix. Like, there’s like a…
Chris: That may be all the spicy at the bottom.
Steve Jones: I know!
Amber: That’s the spicy chunks you’re gonna get in your last swallow.
Steve Jones: It smells like what’s that orange powder stuff that has a bunch of fiber in it that you drink?
Chris: Oh, like Emergen-C? Like the…
Steve Jones: Like a… it stayed in the cup, so maybe I’m all right. Here we go. Here’s my flavored water.
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: I’m, I’m excited to get the spice…
Amber: So…
Chris: … level report.
Steve Jones: Hmm.
Amber: Does it taste like a margarita, Steve?
Steve Jones: Yeah. It’s, good too. Like, it’s not bad. There’s no alcohol in it, but I mean, it’s spicy. So like, I think since it’s so hot it kind of feels like there’s something in there that’s not in there.
Amber: You know, the thought I had about these, there’s a couple of use cases for these where I think it makes sense. One is if you’re, like, camping or something and you don’t wanna have to take, like, all the mixers or, like, the fresh herbs or whatever, but you still wanna be able to have it. But the other thing too is, so Chris had mentioned that Paola gave us that bottle of rum that he’s drinking. What was that? Three or four years ago.
Steve Jones: Couple y-
Amber: Right?
Steve Jones: Like three years ago.
Amber: If you are someone who doesn’t drink a lot, the benefit of this little packet is it doesn’t go bad, right? I mean, also could you take this to outer space? Like, could the astronauts be making themselves some cocktails with the, What, wait, what is this called again? Batchwell?
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: I see lots of uses, and I would say flavor-wise, I’m pretty impressed. We have had, like, other things that are not out of a powder that taste way worse.
I think I might be a two thumbs up for this. Like, it wouldn’t be my every day. I mean, obviously since it takes me five years to get through a bottle of liquor, but, but it’s still, enough and I can think of use cases, that I could see myself going out and buying it again.
And I think I’m gonna enjoy my whiskey sour while we talk.
Steve Jones: This is really spicy. Like, my whole mouth… I mean, it’s good. I like spicy stuff, so it’s, it’s good. I mean, it literally feels like there’s alcohol in here because it’s so hot in my mouth.
Amber: You need some enchiladas and Mexican rice to, like, balance it out.
Steve Jones: Yeah, yeah. It’s good though.
Amber: I’m looking forward to that. We’ll have to go buy some tequila.
Chris: I’m a, I’m a one thumb up for the, the drink quality. For a powder, it’s, it’s great. And I’m, I’m a second thumbs up for smart package design. I don’t know if this is coming across on my camera very well, but they’ve got this little get a refill QR code in the bottom corner of the back of the package, think is just kinda smart. They have it on every single one, of their little packets.
Packaging QR Code Fails
Amber: Have you scanned it? What does it do? It just goes to, like, their website so you can order more.
Chris: I mean, this is a digital podcast. I might as well do it right? Like, here, let’s see. See if I can even get my phone camera to focus on this. It’s…
Amber: Okay, now we can, we can also judge them. I don’t know if we’ve done this yet. You ordered this off Amazon, so I guess that sort of-ish wins for accessibility. They sell it on Amazon because most of our user testers have always told us they buy things on Amazon, so… But where that QR code goes, I don’t know how accessible that is.
Chris: I don’t know if this is ki- but it’s, it’s going to a qrs.ly, and it’s just sitting there. Oh, now we got a redirect to pixelfy.me and then another redirect to Amazon.
Steve Jones: Oh man.
Chris: The Amazon is a generic search for margarita mix, which isn’t even the drink I had. Oops!
Steve Jones: But now they have all those URL parameters.
Chris: Yep.
Amber: They are good at creating alcohol, not so good at marketing.
Steve Jones: I mean, I give it, I give it a thumbs up. It’s, it’s pretty good. I mean, it tastes way better than I thought. It’s a little hard to mix in. I think you’ve really gotta spend some time mixing it to get the full… ‘Cause, like, you can see I missed a lot, like… But pretty good
Amber: Christmas present. We can buy each other shakers.
Steve Jones: There you go.
Our GAAD 2026 Contributor Day Recap
Chris: As we enjoy our cocktails here, it is the day after Global Accessibility Awareness Day. I would argue a particularly exciting and successful Global Accessibility Awareness Day full of real action to improve accessibility and not just talking and learning.
So I’ll share a couple of stats, and then Amber, as is tradition, and Steve can get into the nitty-gritty of some of the things they did, because I don’t have a lot of interesting things to share that I did personally, ’cause I just spent the day testing the Blocksy theme for accessibility-ready requirements.
So that’s all I did. I didn’t build anything. I didn’t lead webinars. But…
Amber: That was a very good contribution to the WordPress community and to accessibility, ’cause I think a lot of people use that theme.
Chris: Yeah, it has like 100,000 installs, so that’s definitely worth something if they take the feedback and do something with it. So we had 98 people pledge for our Global Accessibility Awareness Day pledge program, where people could pledge their time to do accessibility work. In total, across those 98 people, of 364.5 hours were delivered to improve accessibility in WordPress, which is pretty darn cool.
So Amber, I’m curious because our big focus as a team was doing stuff with the accessibility ready requirements. Do you wanna take people through a little bit of what we did and kinda what the results were?
Amber: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s worth noting, I, I did think this was interesting. In 2025, we had 86 people pledge 382 hours, so we had fewer people, but we actually had more hours. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing because I didn’t want people to think that you have to give your whole day to this to make a difference, and that was a big way that I changed some of the communications.
And then because we had a specific project that was a follow-up on the huge accessibility-ready guideline update that I worked on with Joe Dolson for WordPress themes on WordPress.org that wanna use that accessibility-ready tag. We had something that was really concrete, which is we needed people to test the existing themes that already have that tag against the new guidelines and provide feedback to the theme developers.
So that was the big priority, and I was really happy at the number of people who showed up on Zoom, sat on a Zoom webinar with me, some of them for, like, five hours, which was really awesome. And testing, learning how to test and that sort of thing. We had 28 themes get tested. Actually, 29.
It’s not quite the 108 that I was hoping for, but I do think that was a huge dent, and I’ve already talked to Joe Dolson about making this a project at WordCamp Europe to help continue the work that we started yesterday.
So that, that was my big effort, and I was really happy with that. What happened on the dev end of things, Steve?
Steve Jones: Yeah. So on my end of things, I worked on a few improvements inside of Gutenberg. One that had started a little bit before GAAD but spent a lot of hours on, was adding a as decorative checkbox to the Gutenberg image block, and that has since been approved.
And I did some testing on the new, breadcrumbs block that was available in WordPress 7 that came out two days ago, and I found that it was reading out the separator. So you can define the separator, and it’s actually just implemented on the page with a pseudo element, it was being read out by the screen reader, which is not a huge problem, but just a little annoying. So when it comes to like submitting stuff to, to Core or to Gutenberg sometimes the fix is quick, but the actual writing of the issue and the writing of the PR and the back and forth on the PRs can, can be where all your time is taken.
So I got that submitted yesterday. So it’s nice to actually just do a full loop on identifying an issue, creating a PR, get it submitted, and then last night it was approved without change. So in the next version which would probably be a, a minor patch release or something that comes out fairly soon, ’cause they always come out shortly after a major release. We should see those two new features available to all WordPress users throughout the world.
So on the other side, William put together a script that can be run inside of CI, and it’s an automated tool that checks WordPress themes against the official accessibility-ready requirements. The standard a theme must meet to earn the badge in WordPress.org, which Amber was just talking about, and which Amber and, and Joe have done a lot of work on. And so basically what this is, is it’s a, it’s a Playwright script that runs the Axe rules that kind of coincide with those requirements. And you can put in a theme and you can direct it to certain settings pages and then it’ll run these checks. He’s got some things in there about doing almost like user profiles to almost test with different disabilities, as far as an automated test could go. But this is something that you can install in your GitHub CI to run on plugin updates, to ensure that your theme or your WordPress plugin are remaining accessible.
Chris: Sounds incredibly helpful.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: Yeah. Is that an open repo on our GitHub? Equalize Digital GitHub?
Steve Jones: I know it’s something that was in the works, so I think William, I don’t know how many hours he pledged for GAAD yesterday, like four or six hours. So I think he was able to get pretty far with this, but I’m not sure if he’s rolled up the repo yet. But if he does before this episode goes out, we’ll be sure to include a link to that GitHub repo.
WordPress 7.0 Has Officially Arrived
Amber: So of course, the other big thing that happened this week, which you alluded to, Steve, is that WordPress 7.0 was released. And I think partially that might be a little bit of an impact on our GAAD pledges because there were quite a few people who did things related to core last year that this year they were like, they, they reached out to me and they were like, “I wish I could, but I’m so sorry. We have to be testing and doing the release party because it’s going to come out less than 24 hours before the start of GAAD.”
So I do think, though, it is worth talking about it and some of the things that have come from WordPress 7.0 from an accessibility side. The fixes, the enhancements. Should we first take a quick commercial break and then come back.
Steve Jones: Let’s do it.
Brought to you by Accessibility Checker
Steve Jones: 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.
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Amber: Okay, so hot topic.
Admin UI Color Change Drama
Amber: The colors totally changed in WordPress 7.0. I feel like it wasn’t as shocking to me because I’ve been watching you demo it because you’ve been testing with it for a while, right, Steve?
Steve Jones: Yeah, several months, and WordPress 7 was delayed a little bit, so we had even more time with it before the release. So yeah, I got pretty familiar with the colors. But I would say maybe at first it was a little bit of like, “Man, that’s a bright blue. That’s a really bright blue.”
Amber: The same blue that you see on a lot of WordPress.org. I think it started there, and then there was this whole conversation that Matt Mullenweg said where they wanted to re-skin the admin, and so it was like, “Oh, let’s add this to core.” But I have been watching the response on Twitter, and in The Admin Bar Facebook group, which is super interesting, ’cause I think a lot of folks in there probably don’t test release candidates.
So they literally saw it for the first time, or even knew that it was there, after they hit that update button. And man, I can’t… You’re not allowed to quote people, but there was this one person who was super not into it in The Admin Bar, and he said, “You know, I’m all about accessibility, but I don’t need this change. I don’t need higher contrast. I don’t think my clients do. Like, should we actually release it for everyone?”
Which I do think is interesting, ’cause that actually wasn’t an accessibility enhance- it does have better color contrast, but I don’t think that was why it was introduced. I think it was introduced for modernization or something, right?
Steve Jones: I think if you go into a lot of dashboards and many SaaS’s a lot of them are using a similar bright blue like that, and I think it just has a more modern, clean feel. Especially on top of white. So yeah, I saw a lot too yesterday come out and, like, people like, the admin is a million times worse, you know? It’s just so, like, sensationalized, and it’s not. Like it’s…
Chris: Anything for the eyeballs and clicks, right?
Steve Jones: Yeah. And it’s, it just…
Amber: Did they change anything other than the colors? Like, I was trying to figure that out because he said re- like, it was the whole redesign, but then I’m like, all they did was change the color. Did anything else about the admin UI change?
Steve Jones: Didn’t some of the table styles change as well? Like, just minor enhancements to some of the table styles, I think, in certain cases.
Amber: I guess I missed that. Maybe I need to look…
Steve Jones: It’s very minor.
Amber: They weren’t very big changes if I didn’t notice them.
Steve Jones: Well, the thing that…
Amber: Yeah.
Steve Jones: … kinda caught me about the color contrast a little bit when I first, you know, started testing with I think beta one or maybe even before that, was that not just that the colors were changed, but that where there were different colors, they were unified into one color.
So, like, the, the little bubble that shows you, like, how many plugin updates you have or, you know, if there’s comments or things like that in the nav bar, used to be red, and now they’ve been normalized to be that same blue. So it’s kind of a wash on the admin that it’s just the dark gray and the light gray and the blue. And we’ve kind of dropped out, like, the red color to show, like, you know, that you have updates and stuff. So a little jarring to me at first, but, I don’t even know if jarring is the word. It caught my attention.
I think it’s an improvement, and I think it’s okay to say it’s an improvement. I know that us in the WordPress community, we don’t like change. At the same time, we’re saying we want WordPress to be modernized, and we want it to change, and we want it to catch up and be, like, React or be, you know, more AI forward. And, and then we make a color change, and the whole community’s like, “No!” It kinda like, “Really, guys?”
Chris: Yeah. And that actually segues perfectly into another comment that I’ll read, which was someone saying that, “If the community complains about this,” i.e. the color change, “then I firmly believe this contributes to the problem as to why WordPress is so lacking and outdated overall.”
So if we can’t even embrace a modernization of a default color scheme, how are we going to evolve and keep up with these other emerging platforms, right? To your point, Steve.
Steve Jones: Yeah. I mean, that’s a perfect way to put it. And I will say this too, like, with the click of a button, you can just set it back to the color theme it was before.
Chris: Yeah.
Steve Jones: And…
Chris: Yeah, so if you like your WordPress equivalent of Windows 95 teal, go back to it. Like, you know, it’s okay. It’s okay. You can live in the past if you want to live the past.
Amber: Yeah. I mean, I did see Zach Pile posted a little function that he wrote that finds all users on a site and resets it for them because he’s like, “I don’t want to have to explain to my clients why their colors are different.” So I don’t know. I guess, I guess that makes sense.
Steve Jones: Now I will tag on that, you know, a little fun thing that we’ve done on our end is that, and I think we’ve talked about this a little bit in a previous podcast, but Accessibility Checker now will inherit those styles on the front end and the back end. So, you know, go pick your, I don’t know what to call it, pumpkin spice or whatever. Like…
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Steve Jones: And, and…
Chris: That was the great color contrast plugin debate episode from a few of a few…
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Chris: … months ago.
Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah, so if, if the pumpkin spice schema is your favorite then Accessibility Checker will come along with you and inherit those.
Chris: Accessibility Checker, now in pumpkin spice flavor.
Steve Jones: There you go.
Amber: Wrong time of year. Wrong time of year.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: Although, I will say, we were on a kickoff call with a client earlier this week, and we had her share her screen so we could see something about her WordPress, and she was using, like, light blue with white, and I was like, “Man, the contrast on this is so bad. How do you look at this all day?”
I have never changed the colors of my WordPress admin at all, but now that I know I have the option of having a purple heading with Accessibility Checker, maybe I am gonna switch to the purple color palette because, you know…
Steve Jones: There you go.
Chris: Yeah. So the, the colors are getting lot of attention.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
We Highlight Some of the 70+ Accessibility Enhancements in WP 7.0
Chris: But, there were, like, 70-plus other accessibility enhancements, fixes in this release. Some were related to color, but others weren’t. And Amber, you did some work before this recording identifying a few to call out. Do you wanna lead us in a couple? ‘Cause I think you even have some tickets that you raised, for this.
Amber: Yeah, I got my props for my contribution to 7.0. I’m doing a little dance for anybody who can’t see me. I, it’s so nerdy, dorky, but I do kinda like seeing my name on the contributors list when a release comes out. I’ve, I tweeted about this earlier, and I was like, “Yeah, I don’t know if this ever gets old.”
But I, I did do a review back, ’cause I was trying to look. It’s a little bit hard to get an actual number on how many tickets are truly accessibility focused, because not everything that is accessibility actually ends up having an accessibility focus. Sometimes people set it somewhere else, but then we notice or someone on the accessibility team notices it, like Joe will. He’ll be like, “Oh, I’m gonna take that, ’cause this is definitely accessibility,” but nobody’s added the focus.
So it looked like there were 33 tickets with the 7.0 milestone that did have an accessibility focus, but there were 69 that Joe Dolson owned. So I’m going with this there were 70 plus number.
That’s what I’m calling it without me, like, cross-referencing and comparing. And of course, he’s not the only person who does accessibility work. So there might be tickets that didn’t have accessibility that were owned by someone else.
Steve Jones: Now these are, these are all Trac tickets, right?
Amber: Yes, Trac tickets, and I did not look at what was in Gutenberg, so actually maybe there’s hundreds. I don’t even know.
Steve Jones: Probably, yeah.
Amber: Yeah. We can post links to this in the show notes if anyone wants to check it out. But my two tickets that I opened were:
The taxonomy metabox tabs were not programmatically identified as tabs. So that was one that I had opened eight months ago, and it got closed three months ago, but it had been milestoned for 7.0, which is a really interesting thing about how WordPress releases work.
Sometimes things make it into a point release, and sometimes they just say, “Nope, this is gonna go in the next major version.” So there’s a fix that was available, but not available.
Chris: Could I ask you
Amber: But…
Chris: … about that one, Amber?
Amber: Mm-hmm.
Chris: The, the tabs not being programmatically identified, did that mean that people couldn’t get through them with their keyboard, or were they just not being read out properly on a screen reader? Or kinda what was the, the user-facing enhancement that, that came out of that one?
Amber: Yeah. So basically if you can visualize this metabox, for example, the categories metabox, there’s a tab which by default that says all categories, and then you could tab to a view that’s like most used or something like that. And they would technically be able to switch them because there were links.
Basically it was an unordered list of two items with links in them which of course is not correct because a link goes somewhere, it doesn’t toggle visibility of something. But they could have been used, although people wouldn’t really know necessarily which one is currently being shown.
They’d have to intuit, they’d have to figure out if it worked when they selected one, ’cause there was no like ARIA selected or anything telling them that, “Oh yeah, your tab has been selected now,” when it wasn’t previously. So that, you know, it definitely made it a lot more workable for screen reader users.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Steve Jones: For like key, arrow keys was added well, right?
Amber: Yep, so it has better keyboard navigation as well.
Steve Jones: Yep, yep. Very cool.
Amber: And my other one was also related to tab keyboard interaction, although tabs in a very different context, which is inside of the media modals. When you open that, there are actually tab panels which people might not totally realize are tab panels. But when you’re able to choose like Upload or Select or like the Galleries, different views that are in that media modal that opens, those are tabs. And previously there was a tab stop on like the whole container so that you would tab from the control where you select the tab you wanna see, and then it would go to the container instead of the first focusable element.
So my ticket, which was opened around the same time eight months ago, was initially like, we should probably assess whether this is actually the right behavior, because in NVDA in particular, a tab stop on a container can be incredibly verbose.
It basically reads everything in the container, which if you can imagine the media library going to the tab panel that shows all the tiles of all the images, right? Like, it just reads and reads and reads and reads and it’s really overwhelming. And because there’s not a lot of content before the first focusable element on any of those, like it’s usually an input or it’s like a filter dropdown so you could filter what images you’re seeing, we determined that it was better to remove that tab stop.
So it is interesting, like you can open tickets where you’re like, “This is actually a problem,” or you can also open tickets where you’re like, “I think this might be a problem. Can we talk about it?” And that, that’s kind of the difference between those two different tickets that I had opened.
Steve Jones: Yeah, and these are, these are like, these are the kind of PRs I like, right? Like, that are just like, this is literally just remove tabindex. Like, all you had to do. It’s like two lines.
Amber: Really easy fix.
Steve Jones: Of code and, and love clean, little beautiful fixes like this.
Chris: Yeah, so full, full disclosure, before we started recording I was trying to go through and pick a couple of these that I might be able to, to talk about and highlight. One of the ones I picked, because it jumped out at me, was a 13-year-old ticket, and boy, the second I started reading, I was like, “Why did I pick this one?”
But it’s the “review usage of target equals blank in the admin.” I started reading this and it’s just like discussion, discussion, discussion, bleeding into discussion about, “Hey, this discussion’s getting too long. We need to split this off into other tickets so we can discuss the discussion more.”
And the, the discussion kept on evolving until it eventually got closed in this ticket, and I think branched off into some other enhancements for future releases.
But the other, the other one was a simpler one, thankfully for, for my brain power which was WordPress Core’s password reset pre-populates the username to meet the WCAG 2.2 requirement.
So if you’re not familiar with that requirement, I don’t know the exact criterion number, but there’s a new requirement in WCAG 2.2 where basically, if the website already should know some of your information and you’re filling out a form, it should pre-populate those fields with the information it knows about you to not waste your time. And this is particularly helpful for users who have to spend a long time interacting with forms because of how they type or how they enter information. Maybe it’s cognitive, maybe they’re using a sip-and-puff device so it takes a while to type. Whatever it is this is to help them. So it was cool to see that requirement added as well.
Amber: I was just gonna say on the note on the, like, 13-year-old tickets, I do think this is definitely an issue, right, with WordPress. And there was a whole conversation not too long ago. I mean, I don’t know if it was a conversation, but Matt Mullenweg was, like, saying stuff about that in Make WordPress Slack, and about how, you know, there’s like, hundreds and hundreds of tickets. Why do we have this many? Why are they that old?
And then I did see someone suggest maybe we should have AI, like, go and assess some of these really old tickets, but then they were like, “Eh, we don’t want to pay for the credits.” But it does get hard when you have a ticket that has… I mean, like, that one, it was open, it kind of sat.
Then it seemed like there was a big amount of discussion 10 years ago, and there was some action on some items, but it wasn’t enough to close the ticket. Right, and then it sat again, so you have to go back and be like, “Wow, I’m reading this, and some of the people aren’t even around contributing to the project anymore.”
I would say it’s definitely a challenge, and I don’t envy the devs who have to work with tickets like that.
Steve Jones: Well, so I would… This one is, is very interesting to me on many levels too. First off, the, the criterion around submitting tickets to Trac maybe is more strict now on what it requires when you put a ticket in. Because this description of this ticket is very vague and very far-reaching, right?
I mean, it basically starts out and says, “Some links in the settings page, open in the same window, which sometimes can be awful.” Okay. Like, it’s awful.
Amber: Not even a why. Like, not explaining that, well, you might lose your progress if you haven’t saved.
Steve Jones: Yeah, so I mean, there’s like, there’s no examples given. There, I mean, it, it just blankly says general discussion permalinks, things like that. Like, there should be specific examples. These should be broken out into smaller tickets. Catch-all tickets really become a huge issue in programming and, you know, if you wanna clear out the backlog. You know, in our, in our system, we actually set a time limit.
So if you have a ticket that’s been open for a year, it’s actually gonna get closed. I get an email my inbox from Linear that says, “Hey, this ticket is expired. It’s, it’s going to be closed.” I can reopen it if I want, but a lot of…
Amber: Wait a minute.
Steve Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Amber: And now moment of truth on the Accessibility Craft podcast. Are my tickets being closed? Now, it probably would’ve told me too. Would I get an email if my tickets were being closed?
Steve Jones: Well, if you look at Accessibility Checker, there’s not that many open tickets right now because , I mean, there’s, there’s a good deal made this year, but there’s not a lot of old ones.
Amber: Because you guys are awesome.
Steve Jones: We try to triage and, you know clean the issue list as much as we can. With a small team we can always do better. But, what should happen is those tickets should be really, individual instances should be broken into separate tickets. Why did the back and forth is so contentious ’cause this seems like an easy fix, right?
Amber: At some point Joe said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have them open in a new tab, and instead what we should do is have like the heartbeat be aware if the page has been saved and instead pop up right like a browser alert, you know?”
So I do think it is interesting. There’s different ways to approach this kind of thing. You don’t have to default to if you’re in the middle of a form type process, all links open in a new tab.
Maybe instead it’s know that they haven’t saved and alert them and say, “Are you sure?”
Steve Jones: I mean, or, or link them to a new window and just put an icon and a screen reader warning that it’s gonna open in a new window. Gutenberg I think does a really good job at this. There’s several links throughout Gutenberg that open in a new window, and they always have the icon. Not sure if they always have the screen reader text, but…
Amber: I think they do?
Steve Jones: I think they do.
Amber: I don’t know.
Steve Jones: This is a very interesting ticket, how it could actually, like, persist for 13 years.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Any other patches we wanna highlight from this list?
Amber: So this is a cool one. You know how when you upload an image to the media library, it will sometimes pull in, like, the metadata about who the author was, or if you have a caption or anything like that? Well, somewhat new-ish, newer than when that was coded in for the media library there’s now the ability to save alt text in the IPTC format, yeah,
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: In images, and WordPress was not importing that in. But in 7.0, now when you upload an image, if you’ve already saved alt text on it in your image editing software, it will import that into WordPress, so I think that’s kinda cool.
Chris: That’s handy. That’s handy
Steve Jones: Yeah. I mean, as long as that alt text is correct. Like, because we all know that text can be modified based on the context in which the image lives too sometimes. You still gotta be mindful.
Chris: For sure.
Amber: Yeah. I’m trying to think about what else is sort of interesting. Oh, on the topic of you mentioned, like, tiny fixes that are kind of neat. There was a whole conversation, again, a very old ticket I’m pretty sure, about the fact that there are redundant edit links, so the… When you’re on the post page and you see the table of all the posts, you could click the title of the post to go to the editor, or there’s a little edit that shows up if you hover or if you tab through.
And Andrea had opened this 11 years ago, it looks like. And again, another ticket that had a lot of conversation and back and forth because initially he was like, “Maybe we should hide this so there aren’t redundant tab stops.” But then where it actually ended up, and we can link to this, Joe’s comment that I thought was really interesting, and there was back and forth about it, but it was like, I mean, this is the same as for a mouse user.
They’d have the same pause ’cause they’d have to go to the title, hover, and then go click the edit link. But what they ended up doing was these links used to have different ARIA labels that made it clear that they went to the edit page, but that was different text than what was visible. And after all the discussion, it was determined that, hey, no, it would actually be better for the text of the link to just be the visible text.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: And adding this extra ARIA label, it, it’s odd, and it could also cause problems because, for example, on the post title, just because default WordPress is to send that to the editor, that doesn’t mean that some theme or plugin developer hasn’t said, “Actually, I want this to go to the view on the front end,” right?
And then if you do that, the ARIA label that WordPress is adding is explicitly wrong. So that was, again, the fix was let’s delete something that we thought was a good idea from an accessibility standpoint, but actually realized later on, nope, this was trying too hard. Let’s go back to basics.
Steve Jones: Yep, sometimes the best ARIA is no ARIA.
So we added a feature to the image block that allows you to mark it as decorative. So before, when you would add the image block, you know, it would instruct you to, like, leave it blank if it’s a decorative image. And where, where this is fine and it will make it decorative, where it’s not fine is we don’t explicitly know whether or not the user intended for that image to be decorative or not. And now with a checkbox that you can actually check, you’re explicitly saying, “This is decorative, treat it as decorative.”
Whereas before, you know, they could’ve just forgot to add alt text and then the screen reader just doesn’t see it. And what this does is, it allows us to add a role to it, and we had some interesting conversation too about whether the…
We had typically thought that role presentation was the way to go to mark images as decorative, but Joe Dolson kinda suggested that we go with role none, because they essentially mean the same thing.
Amber: But it’s shorter , which I thought was hilarious. I was like, “It’s the same,” and he’s like, “Yeah, but that one’s shorter, so let’s just do that.”
Steve Jones: Right. Right. So, so why do this, right? Besides, you know, people being able to explicitly say that it’s a decorative image too, but what it, what it does is it, it allows, know scanners such as the Accessibility Checker to actually know that you meant this 100% to be a decorative image. It helps with machine learning. You know if you’re using AI to scan the page, and a big thing with 7.0 was adding in the AI connector to be able to use AI inside of WordPress, and if you install the AI Experiments plugin, you can actually generate alt text for certain images and things like that.
Or there’s plenty of other plugins that allow you to generate alt text. But what if that that AI knew that that image is explicitly decorative? Don’t waste tokens generating an alt text for it. There’s probably other reasons. Am I missing some, Amber?
WP 7.0 Adds an AI Layer
Chris: Yeah, and I mean, we’re talking about accessibility in WordPress 7.0, but that is, that isn’t even necessarily, at least for people, I would argue, the big news of 7.0, which is the, AI integration layer or API layer, which I’m sure will have accessibility implications. But there’s already interesting conversations happening with that too.
Amber: I mean, if this wasn’t the Accessibility Craft Podcast, I feel like we would be talking about that integration and whether or not that is a security risk because this is what I am hearing. Maybe you shouldn’t put your API credentials in that little input field. I don’t know. What do you think, Steve?
Steve Jones: You don’t have to put your API credentials in that field. You can use a constant, like in, in the config file or an environment variable at the server level.
Amber: Okay, hold on, pause for a second. You…
Steve Jones: Yeah, a…
Amber: … can use a constant. Me, Chris, typical WordPress users are gonna go type their credentials in that field.
Steve Jones: I will say that, you know, even at that level, that is just one little step to try to not have the key actually visible in there. But the key doesn’t get encrypted when it goes into the database if you put it in the input field. So I would at the very least use a constants or an environment variable to, to define that. I would probably, me personally, I would caution against this stuff on a production environment altogether. And I mean, I actually…
Chris: If you don’t have a spending limit set on your API key and you put it…
Steve Jones: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: … on your production site, make sure you have a spending limit set, like, before you do that.
Steve Jones: It’s a, it’s a faucet. Once you turn the faucet on, anybody can get water from it, right? Like, so any plugin, any theme can, if they detect that there are API keys, they can utilize it. And so there is no permissions layer built in in that respect, and really any permissions layer that would be built in, in WordPress would, you’d be able to get around it because it’s WordPress. It’s, it’s a hook system.
Like, there’s really nothing you could do to, around any kind of stopgap that would be put between the license key and who gets to use it, other than maybe outside of WordPress at the, the API level. it’s an interesting thing. Now, I have tried it locally, yesterday or earlier today, I forget, but I did try some of this locally and I was using the Claude extension to try to connect ’cause I wanna see what it’s doing. And and it immediately went to my theme file editor and wanted to change my functions.php file.
I’m like, “What are you doing?”
Amber: Wait, what, what prompt did you give it that made it wanna do that?
Steve Jones: You can create application passwords now. So I was given an application password to connect to the REST API on my local environment, and I had to use the extension because it’s a local environment, it’s sandboxed, a bunch of security stuff. Like, it immediately just, it it couldn’t get through something in the headers were being stripped out in the authentication. But it, it immediately just tried to go in and edit my functions.php file in the theme editor. I thought it was hilarious.
Amber: So next time you need to first include in your skill listening to our episode on the Accessibility Craft podcast about cowboy coding.
Steve Jones: Yeah, this is, this is cowboy coding on a whole ‘nother level.
Amber: Well, I think overall 7.0, you know, it, it had some good stuff for accessibility. It had some other interesting features. I don’t know if it has… I think the things that most people were talking about ended up getting stripped out as far as collaborative editing. So I think it’ll be more interesting to see what comes down the road.
Maybe it’s laying the foundation for a little bit more in the future.
Well, any final thoughts before we sign off?
Chris: Nope, nothing from me other than I’m excited to play around with 7.0 in my local and see what Codex does to my functions.php file.
Steve Jones: There you go. And my spice is all settling to the bottom of the glass.
Amber: Well, you didn’t drink fast enough ’cause mine is gone.
Chris: Well, we’ll see you all for another conversation episode in a couple of weeks.
Steve Jones: Cheers, guys.
Amber: Bye.
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