Remove widget accessibility mode

[joedolson]

With the introduction of the new block editing experience for widgets management, WordPress will have four separate interfaces for managing widgets: block editing, customizer, classic widgets, and accessbility mode.

The accessibility team would like to explore merging the characteristics that accessibility mode uses for better accessibility into the classic widget screen, to cut down to only three modes of operation for widgets.

This will require identifying the characteristics of accessibility mode and finding ways to reproduce those characteristics within the existing widget UI.

The key differences that are obvious are:

1) Use of a text link to 'Add' or 'Edit'
2) Links target each widget via a URL to manage independently.
3) Selection options to choose which sidebar and position will be used for a widget.

These characteristics allow a single widget to be edited in isolation, the ability to assign a location without drag and drop, and visible text tools for handling widgets.

One possibility to explore is having an add/edit option that opens a given widget in a modal that includes the location selection tools provided in accessibility mode.

[ryokuhi]

We reviewed this ticket today during the accessibility team's bug scrub.

To sum up the discussion, the team agreed that the final goal for this ticket is to have a single classic widget screen which is accessible by default. This will need work in two directions:

• reach feature parity by adding features that are currently only available in accessibility mode to the classic widget screen (as pointed out in the ticket description above);
• solve accessibility issues currently found in the classic widget screen.

This ticket will probably be better addressed if split into smaller chunks, to make progress little by little. But first, it's better to list all accessibility issues that can be found in the classic widget screen. To do so, testing the classic widget screen with and without assistive technologies would help in finding existing bugs.

Since WordPress 5.8, the new Block Widget screen is the default, so to test the old classic widget screen you'll have to install the ​Classic Widgets ​plugin, which is available in the plugin repository and can be installed using your preferred method (either by downolading and uploading it or by installing it directly from the admin screen).

[sabernhardt]

I'm setting this to Future Release. If we can solve any specific problems in the classic widget screen for 5.9, that could be addressed in a new ticket.