Hi Amanda. Last September, in the WordPress issue site (Github?), someone opened a thread to attempt to stop the change that would remove navigation mode and leave screen reader users with no effective way to navigate by blocks. I read through much of that discussion, and responses from WordPress developers indicated that navigation mode was not necessary because list view provided a much better solution for block-by-block navigation.

Recently, I discovered that list view is a poor solution for navigating several consecutive paragraph blocks, as screen reader users have no idea which paragraph blocks they’re navigating past. I believe david Goldfield shared this with you. If I read your response correctly, you seem to be saying that list view is not intended for navigating blocks, which seems to contradict the WordPress position previously noted.

I’ve read through your entire blog (thanks for writing it). There are a couple of places where it mentions making sure you were selecting or focused on such and such block, but no where does the blog describe how to navigate from one block to the next. Down-arrowing through every line of text in multiple consecutive paragraphs is not an acceptable option.

I’ve managed to stumble onto a Mac shortcut, option+down arrow. This is the shortcut to move to next paragraph. It also lets me move through blocks in canvas view, with no need for list view. But I have no idea whether this is working by design or dumb luck. Because when WordPress took away navigation mode, they removed all mention of tab and shift+tab from their documentation and replaced it with nothing.

What I would really like to see is an official position from the WordPress developers on how to navigate from one block to the next that conveys context to screen reader users, without requiring a down arrow for every line of text in a paragraph, and that is stable and won’t change after auto updating to a point release.
If you might share your thoughts on this topic, I would appreciate being enlightened. If you would, please reply by email, as the comment section of this blog site has abysmal accessibility.