Logging in to WordPress

1. Navigate to wordpress.com
2. From the homepage, go to the Log In link.
3. The log in page will load with focus on the Email Address or Username Edit field. Type your account username or password. Tab to the Continue Button and press enter.
4. The password page will load with focus on the Password Edit field. Enter you account password. Tab to the Log In Button.

Composing a new post

After login and from the WordPress homepage, navigate the Write link to compose a new post.

The new post page will load with focus on the Edit Title Edit field. This will let you edit the title of your post.

Use tab to move from the title field to the text entry area (JAWS announces it as “Rich Text Area”).

In the text editor, you can use the following commands:

Alt + F9 – Menu

Alt + F10 – Toolbar

Alt + 0 – Help

The Toolbar command will quickly move your focus to the toolbar for the post editor where you’ll find controls for text editing, such as: add content (media), bold, italic, alignment, text color, etc.

Adding Headings

When creating web content with WordPress, it’s important to use headings. Headings are just special text that denote titles, section titles, or subtitles on a webpage. However, as you likely know, headings are important tool that screen reader users utilize to navigate a webpage. Here is how we add a heading in WordPress.

1. In the location you’d like to add a heading, type out what you’d like your heading to say.
2. Select the text using the shift key. You can verify you have the write text selection by using the Shift + Insert + Down Arrow command to read what is currently selected.
3. Use Insert + F5 to bring up the list of form controls on the page and navigate to the Paragraph menu. Press the down arrow to open the menu and use the up and down arrows to navigate to the heading you’d like to use.
4. Once you’ve used this feature, the “paragraph button” will be renamed to whatever you chose. For example, if you used this feature to add a heading, it will now be called the heading button in the form field list.

Add Links

Adding links using the controls in WordPress is difficult and the outcomes seems to be inconsistent. Instead, I suggest you add links by creating them in Microsoft Word and then copying and pasting them into WordPress.

Publishing a post

When you’re done with you post, you can publish it by navigating to the Publish Button and pressing enter. Note that once you’ve published your post, the publish button becomes the update button.

Editing Drafts

Navigating to the drafts section of WordPress seems to be difficult (if not impossible) with JAWS. Instead, you might consider bookmarking: http://wordpress.com/posts/drafts

Once you’re in the drafts area, use Insert + F7 to open the list of links. You should find your draft post in this list under whatever title it was given. Untitled posts will show up as untitled.