Formal Accessibility Complaint — Dyslexia, Cognitive Accessibility and WordPress Editor Usability

[alan53crete]

Hi,

I am writing to raise a formal accessibility complaint concerning the current WordPress editing and administration environment, particularly its impact on users with dyslexia and other cognitive accessibility requirements.

I am severely dyslexic. I have nevertheless spent most of my adult life reading, researching, writing, teaching and working professionally with complex information. My difficulty with WordPress is therefore not an inability to understand complicated material.

The problem is that WordPress repeatedly makes unnecessarily complicated what should be very simple editorial tasks.

My website exists for one principal purpose: to publish my writing.

My requirements are straightforward.

I write a post.

I decide which section of the website it belongs to.

I publish it.

For example, I have a Stories section and several separate Series. A post should appear in Stories, Series One, Series Two or Series Three according to my choice.

That should be a basic publishing decision.

Instead, I have had to understand and manipulate categories, special Posts Pages, Query Loops, taxonomy filters, block hierarchies, parent blocks, Post Templates, navigation objects, template parts and several different editing interfaces simply to control where a piece of writing appears.

On mobile, the problem becomes significantly worse.

Controls appear and disappear depending upon which block happens to be selected. Selecting the correct parent block can require moving through several nested levels. Drag-and-drop controls are unreliable. Some controls fail to respond. The same task can lead into different editing interfaces depending upon where it is approached from.

This creates a substantial cognitive burden.

For a user with severe dyslexia, long technical instructions, unfamiliar terminology, nested interfaces and inconsistent controls make a simple task considerably more difficult than it needs to be.

The terminology itself is part of the accessibility problem.

A writer should not need to understand expressions such as:

Query Loop

Taxonomy Filter

Post Template

Template Part

Parent Block

Query Type

in order to say:

Put this article in this section of my website.

WordPress may require those concepts internally. The user should not.

Plain English is an accessibility issue.

A publishing platform should present ordinary editorial decisions in the language used by the people actually making those decisions.

For example:

Where should this post appear?

Stories

Series One

Series Two

Series Three

Select one.

Publish.

The underlying software can process that choice however it needs to. The writer should not have to understand the architecture behind it.

I have now spent many hours administering WordPress when I should have been researching and writing. On several occasions I have seriously considered abandoning my website altogether because of the complexity involved in carrying out basic publishing tasks.

That should concern WordPress from an accessibility perspective.

I am exactly the sort of user a publishing platform should be capable of supporting: an independent writer using his own domain to publish original long-form work, historical research, photographs and field observations for readers who wish to follow that work.

Instead of allowing me to concentrate on writing, WordPress repeatedly requires me to become a website administrator.

I am asking the WordPress Accessibility Team to examine this not simply as a usability issue, but as a question of cognitive accessibility.

In particular, I would ask WordPress to consider the following:

• Basic publishing decisions should be expressed in plain English.

• Users should be able to decide where a post appears without understanding WordPress architecture.

• Mobile administration should provide the same essential controls clearly and reliably.

• Common publishing tasks should not require navigation through several nested block levels.

• Documentation intended for ordinary users should explain the task first and the technical mechanism only where necessary.

• Cognitive accessibility, including dyslexia and information-processing burden, should be treated as an integral part of accessibility.

• Technical terminology should not be the default language presented to ordinary writers carrying out ordinary editorial tasks.

WordPress states that accessibility is an ongoing concern and that the Accessibility Team exists to review and improve accessibility within WordPress.

I am asking that cognitive accessibility be considered with the same seriousness as visual, motor and assistive-technology accessibility.

WordPress may be technically capable of doing everything I require.

That is not enough.

If a straightforward publishing task is so difficult to discover, understand and execute that a severely dyslexic but experienced writer repeatedly considers abandoning the platform, then there is an accessibility problem.

The technology should serve the writing.

At present, too often, WordPress makes the writer serve the technology.

[dilip2615]

Hello Team,
I tested on the current trunk (WordPress develop) in the block editor.

A few notes from testing:

1. There is already an editor preference that addresses part of the icon-only UI concern: Options (⋮) -> Preferences -> Accessibility -> "Show button text labels" When enabled, toolbar controls show text (e.g. Add, Undo, Redo, Document Overview) instead of icons only.

2. That preference helps with discoverability of toolbar actions, but it does not fully address the broader cognitive-load points in this ticket (hierarchy, visual complexity, colour or contrast preferences for dyslexia, overall editor density).

3. Because the request spans multiple UX/a11y areas rather than a single reproducible bug, it may be better tracked as several smaller, actionable tickets (or linked Gutenberg issues), each with a clear acceptance criterion, rather than one large core patch.

Note: I attached a screenshot here: ​https://prnt.sc/DPPi66PMMqxl

[dianeelizabeth]

This was a very compelling statement, and as someone who is dyslexic myself, I wholeheartedly understand your concern. While WPress eventually fixes this, you can lighten the burden as of now:

> Install "Classic Editor" plugin: Brings back the old simple editor that the WordPress team has maintained.
> Use 'Categories' only, skip Query Loops and just do: Categories equals to Stories, Series One, etc., then your theme/menu auto lists them.
> Admin simplification plugin: "User Admin Simplifier" or "Admin Menu Editor" can help hide all the blocks/template parts stuff so that you only see "Add Post" + "Categories".
> Mobile: Ultimately, you can also use the WordPress mobile app, as it's actually simpler than mobile browser - for the basic publish + category select functions.