## Summary Alex Stine, a cloud engineer and accessibility consultant who is blind, audits the Gutenberg block editor in a development build of WordPress 6.3 using a screen reader. He walks through keyboard navigation, the editor's browse and focus modes, and the differences between Windows and Mac screen readers, surfacing where the editing experience breaks down for users without vision. The audit catalogs concrete regressions and design gaps and argues for better development practices and more accessibility contributors. ## Key Points - Gutenberg behaves differently across screen readers; the experience is better on Mac than on Windows. - Arrow keys aren't constrained to the current block or field, so navigation produces unexpected context switches; a "block navigation" setting helps but is limited. - The editor splits into edit mode (edit the block) and select mode (a simplified list of blocks), and toggling between focus and browse modes is a recurring friction point. - Dynamic blocks like the navigation block and table block have poor accessibility; the navigation block also triggers JavaScript errors and breaks empty paragraph and document blocks. - Focus isn't managed properly, captions lack a formatting toolbar, the media library isn't accessible, and screen readers sometimes receive false announcements. - Full site editing / the site editor is inconsistent: block options are confusing, settings arrangements vary block to block, and list view is an improvement but still hard to discover. ## Claim Atoms - **Gutenberg accessibility lacks enough contributors** — Stine ties the editor's gaps to a shortage of people working on accessibility. - **Tab key only reaches the toolbar, not document structure** — forcing users into browse mode to navigate content. ## Links - [[Accessibility Enforced at Authoring Time Beats Post-Hoc Auditing]] — Stine's block-editor failures show why accessibility must be built into authoring controls and focus behavior instead of recovered after publishing. - [[Being Anticipated Beats Being Tolerated - Visible Inclusion Shifts the Burden]] — a screen-reader user should encounter an editor designed for their workflow, not a nominally available interface that leaves navigation repair to them. - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Open Source Governance MOC]] — treats contributor capacity and editor accessibility as governance obligations of a widely shared publishing platform.