Dear WordPress Community,

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. 

Update to 6.6

This morning, we updated the instance of WordPress running www.bates.edu to the most recent version, 6.6. Most of this update’s 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.

Block Accessibility

In August our partners in Accessible Education and Campus Life flagged for us that the Foldaway and Expandable Section blocks weren’t performing as intended on certain screen readers. We looked into it and discovered that these two blocks required some new code; now they’re both fully accessible.

Image Accessibility

One of the most powerful ways we can improve the accessibility of our website is the creation of Alternative Text for images. Alternative text, or alt text, is a concise text description conveying the content or purpose of an image. Of our website’s 36,000 images, roughly one in three are missing alt text — 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.

Next Steps

If you have any questions or concerns about these updates or WordPress in general, or if you would like to schedule an individual WordPress training, you can reach us at webteam@bates.edu.

Thanks!

Nick and Jake