v26.2 | Search Page Accessibility Improvements, Search Engines Indexing on Listing Pages, Bug Fixes and More!

Goooood morning! Oh, it’s a big one, this Sprint Release. Allowing search indexing for all Listing Pages, a whole lot of accessibility improvements for the Search Page, improvements for screen readers, upgrade to WordPress 6.9, and much much more. Let’s have a look:

Features 🛠️

PLANET-8061 Upgrade to WordPress 6.9

Planet 4 now runs on WordPress 6.9! To learn more about it, check out this post on WordPress.

PLANET-7980 Global landing page accessibility: improve alphabetical headings with screen reader text

There has been some confusion around single letter headings, as they are not descriptive for screen reader users. To improve this, screen reader text now read out “Sites starting with the letter A.”, making it more descriptive and accessible.

PLANET-7684 Merge master-theme translations into one text domain

Since the Blocks plugin is retiring soon, it was a good time to check the current translation domains and possibly remove some of them. (The frontend/backend separation has been preserved.)

Learn more about Translations here.

PLANET-8100 Remove the obsolete list of Analytics Global Projects

To populate the Global Projects list in the Analytics sidebar, we fetch that information from a spreadsheet. The problem with this is that this list is mostly outdated, and it’s also not immediately apparent that there could be an issue.

However: Since this is mandatory on certain occasions, the list can’t just be removed, as it would effectively prevent users from publishing when there’s an issue with the spreadsheet. To solve this: Replace the hardcoded list of Global Projects with just one item:

name: “Not Applicable”
id: 989999

PLANET-8087 Remove country selector text P4 setting

Previously, for the country selector text, there was a custom setting for the text itself. This has been retired, and it will now directly use the core site.name instead (this one comes from Settings > General > Site Title).

PLANET-8071 Listing pages: add feature flag to allow search engines indexing

Some NROs have a strong SEO strategy built around their listing pages, and removing indexation (which happened recently) on deeper pages negatively impacted their performance.

At the moment, this is hurting organic traffic for some NROs who use this keyword strategy as it depends on the unique content that appears on deeper paginated pages (page 2, 3, 4, 5…) being indexable by Google. So, changes!

On the Planet 4 > Search section add a description text (same as we have in the Features section)
- “Options that affect SEO and in-site search.“
A new checkbox item
- Title: “Allow indexing of all listing pages”
- Description: “Allows search engines to index all pages in listings (tags, categories, etc)”. When off, only the first page is being indexed”

The option is off by default, preserving the current functionality.

Search Page Accessibility

Since there have been many changes around Search page accessibility, let’s collect them in a quick overview:

PLANET-7995 Add accessible label to the close button in the filter modal

The close button in the filters modal had no accessible name. A label “Close filters“ to the close button has been added in the filter modal.

PLANET-7989 Ensure H1 with result count is announced on page load (desktop + mobile)

When the page loads, the focus does not move to the heading with the results count. Now, the H1 is discoverable on load after a new search.

PLANET-7988 Announce result title first, before image, tag, or metadata

On the previous order, screen reader announced image, tag, and meta information before the title. Now, the result title heading is the first element in the DOM order for each result item. Additionally: the image has been made “decorative” so that it’s ignored by screen readers.

PLANET-7986 Move Skip to search results before refine-by form

The “Skip to search results” link was positioned after the refine-by/search form in the focus order, meaning users had to tab through all search controls before they can use the skip link. No more! The “Skip to search results” link has been moved so that it’s above the refine by form.

PLANET-7985 Make each result title a heading

Previously, result titles were marked up as <a> instead of <heading> however: Screen reader users often navigate search results by jumping between headings. So from now on, each search result title has a level 4 heading.

PLANET-8031 Use a simple and clear name for the submit icon

When focus moved to the search icon, screen readers start announcing instructions like “Press return / enter…”. That was confusing. A change has been made so that screen readers now read “Search “ instead of “ Press return/enter or click to search”.