WordPress Asked to Make Adding and Moving Widgets Accessible to the Blind Once Again
An accessibility advocate has asked WordPress to restore the ability for blind users to add and move widgets. Fellow blind and sighted WordPress users are urged to add their support to this effort.
Once upon a time, blind WordPress users enjoyed the ability to add and move widgets at will using the keyboard, but this accessibility vanished somewhere along the WordPress development cycle.
“I’m disappointed that WordPress has removed accessibility for widgets. Dragging widgets is the only way to add or rearrange them,” said Monica Willyard, a freelance writer and publisher of The Scanners Guild blog, in a post on Twitter. “They fixed it in version 2.5, and they seem to have broken it again.”
Willyard, like many other blind Internet users, is frustrated when keyboard navigation alternatives and other reasonable accessibility accommodations are not provided.
“At the moment, I’m having very angry and unprintable thoughts about the enventor of the mouse and the drag and drop process,” she said. “I have had four completely unrelated projects today where I can’t do what I need to do because the programmers relied on drag and drop.”