Add bulk moving to items in the menu screen

[javad2000]

Hello
I am blind and I use WordPress with screen reader software (JAWS and NVDA).
Using WordPress menu editor is too tedious and time-consuming for a blind user, although other features are quite accessible.
When I go to Appearance > Menus and I add many items to the menu, I cannot rearrange the menu items by drag&drop. I can use Move up / Move down / Move under options for moving the menu items, but this is too time-consuming. I need to press Move Up button 20 times if I want to move an item up to 20 steps higher. If I want to move 5 items up by 20 steps, I need to press "Move up" 100 times, over and over. If I want to create a hierarchical menu with an average of 30 menu items, I need to take about 3 hours on rearranging the items.

Bulk Action Feature Request:
I want to have checkboxes beside menu items, so I can select several menu items simultaneously and apply a bulk move / reposition action on all of them simultaneously. For example, I select 6 menu items at a time and I have two comboboxes: parent item, position. I select "About Us" as the parent item, and "3" as their position. This way, all 6 items go to position 3 under "About Us". This is much faster than pressing "Move Up" 120 times for reordering those 6 items.

Bulk actions are available in all WordPress taxonomies (Pages, posts, plugins, themes, etc.). I wonder why bulk actions are not available for menu items.

Thank you

[ryokuhi]

Hello @javad2000, and thank you for reporting this problem.
The ticket was discussed during the weekly accessibility bug scrub. The accessibility team agrees that, while this is a major problem for screen reader users, also sighted users could benefit from such a feature.
The ticket needs some design: all interfaces where bulk actions are available use WP tables, while the menu screen is different, so we can't apply the same design.

[ryokuhi]

This ticket was discussed today during the weekly accessibility team's bug-scrub.
@joedolson suggested that some inspiration on how to create a system to move multiple menu items at the same time can be taken from how multiple block are selected and moved in Gutenberg.

[audrasjb]

Hi,
We are 1 week from Beta 1, and given this ticket doesn't have any proposed design/patch, I don't think it's realistic to add this new feature in WP 5.7. Moving to Future Release. As ticket owner, @azhiyadev, if you are aware of any incoming work on this ticket, please feel free to move it back to milestone 5.7.