Wagtail now has official accessibility support targets: we are aiming for compliance with `WCAG2.1 <https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/>`_, AA level. WCAG 2.1 is the international standard which underpins many national accessibility laws.
Wagtail isn’t fully compliant just yet, but we have made many changes to the admin interface to get there. We thank the UK Government (in particular the CMS team at the Department for International Trade), who commissioned many of these improvements.
Here are changes which should make Wagtail more usable for all users regardless of abilities:
* Increase font-size across the whole admin (Beth Menzies, Katie Locke)
* Improved text color contrast across the whole admin (Beth Menzies, Katie Locke)
* Added consistent focus outline styles across the whole admin (Thibaud Colas)
* Ensured the 'add child page' button displays when focused (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)
This release also contains many big improvements for screen reader users:
* Added more ARIA landmarks across the admin interface and welcome page for screen reader users to navigate the CMS more easily (Beth Menzies)
* Improved heading structure for screen reader users navigating the CMS admin (Beth Menzies, Helen Chapman)
* Make icon font implementation more screen-reader-friendly (Thibaud Colas)
* Removed buggy tab order customisations in the CMS admin (Jordan Bauer)
* Screen readers now treat page-level action dropdowns as navigation instead of menus (Helen Chapman)
* Fixed occurrences of invalid HTML across the CMS admin (Thibaud Colas)
* Add empty alt attributes to all images in the CMS admin (Andreas Bernacca)
Again, this is still a work in progress –if you are aware of other existing accessibility issues, please do `open an issue <https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3AAccessibility>`_ if there isn’t one already.
* Rearranged SCSS folder structure to the client folder and split them approximately according to ITCSS. (Naomi Morduch Toubman, Jonny Scholes, Janneke Janssen, Hugo van den Berg)
* Added support for custom search handler classes to modeladmin's IndexView, and added a class that uses the default Wagtail search backend for searching (Seb Brown, Andy Babic)
* Added ``process_child_object`` and ``exclude_fields`` arguments to ``Page.copy()`` to make it easier for third-party apps to customise copy behavior (Karl Hobley)
The icon font implementation has been changed to be invisible for screen-reader users, by switching to using `Private Use Areas <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas>`_ Unicode code points. All of the icon classes (``icon-user``, ``icon-search``, etc) should still work the same, except for two which have been removed because they were duplicates:
