For the last few months, the CMS team has been focused on building out the design system for Craft 6. Every single component is being designed with accessibility in mind, and we’ll be able to address some of the trickier issues that we couldn’t address in a 5.x release.
In addition, we closed the year with many accessibility improvements to this website and our Documentation site. Among the more visible changes are the global updates to site colors to improve color contrast and readability.
Happy reading!
Control Panel
General
In 5.8.19, we fixed the accessible names of the Matrix field “New entry” buttons. In cases where there was only a single type of entry that you could add, the visible button name did not match the button’s accessible name. As of the update, the visible label now matches the control’s accessible name.
Keyboard navigation
In 5.8.19, we fixed a bug where focus rings within selected table rows had insufficient contrast.
We also resolved a bug where focusing on a scrolling element index container triggered a focus outline on all of the checkboxes inside of it.
In 5.9.0, we updated more drag-and-drop actions to be keyboard-accessible. This includes:
- Reordering default table columns in the Customize Sources modal
- Reordering widgets on the Dashboard page
- Reordering sites inside a site group
Screen reader accessibility
In version 5.5.4, we added additional accessibility information to the My Account navigation. Previously, the active page in the My Account set was visually marked with an inverse background color. With this release, the active page link is also specified with an aria-current="page" attribute.
In 5.8.19, we added alternative text to the QR code displayed during setup of an authenticator app.
In 5.8.21, we marked many CSS font icons in the control panel as decorative. In many cases, the icons were redundant, as accessible text or roles conveyed the same meaning. This also resolved issues caused by CSS content not being translated for non-English languages. (See PRs #18078 and #18075)
Dragging motion
The drag-and-drop updates described in the “Keyboard navigation” section are also accessible to a single pointer without requiring a dragging motion.