WP Accessibility 2.2.0 includes one major new feature and one substantial change.

New Feature: Video Pausing

The major new feature is an option that will inject a play/pause button on autoplaying videos that don’t have controls and that will automatically pause those videos if the prefers-reduced-motion flag is detected. There are many cases this could cover, but one of the most significant is usage of the WordPress “cover” block with a featured video. This embeds the video without controls, which can lead to accessibility problems with undesirable movement.

Major Change: Refactored JavaScript

The substantial change is that I’ve refactored all of the front-end JavaScript to collapse the multiple files into a single script and to remove the dependency on jQuery.

While the new scripting is pretty solid, it does mean that everything is a bit different; so there may be new conflicts or cases that I didn’t catch in the refactoring. If you spot something on the front-end that isn’t working quite right, don’t hesitate to raise an issue on GitHub!

Miscellaneous Changes

In addition to these major changes, there are a number of miscellaneous other changes. The designs of the alt text, longdesc, and the new video play/pause buttons have been unified, so that they all behave the same way.

There are miscellaneous improvements to catch some special cases previously missed for focus checking and locating fake buttons and links, and fixes to some undesirable shifts in position.