Dear WordPress Community,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are excited to share with you recent changes and accessibility improvements that have been made in WordPress this morning, as well as an offer of personalized WordPress training. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Update to 6.6<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This morning, we updated the instance of WordPress running www.bates.edu<\/a> to the most recent version, 6.6. Most of this update\u2019s changes are under the hood, though you will notice visual changes in the right sidebar panel when editing pages, namely to features like Publication status, Featured image, and Revisions. Honestly, it took me a moment to find where the Trash option had moved, but all the options are still there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Block Accessibility<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In August our partners in Accessible Education and Campus Life flagged for us that the Foldaway and Expandable Section blocks weren\u2019t performing as intended on certain screen readers. We looked into it and discovered that these two blocks required some new code; now they\u2019re both fully accessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Image Accessibility<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most powerful ways we can improve the accessibility of our website is the\u00a0creation of Alternative Text for images<\/a>. Alternative text, or alt text, is a concise text description conveying the content or purpose of an image. Of our website\u2019s 36,000 images, many are missing alt text \u2014 therein lies our opportunity. This morning we introduced a feature in WP that will remind site managers to provide alt text for their images before publishing new content. This reminder prompt will help us get closer to our accessibility goal of 100% of images having alt text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n