Yoast SEO 3.4: accessibility first

Today we’re releasing Yoast SEO 3.4, a release mostly aimed at improving our accessibility. Which means you won’t see most of the changes, but they’ll make a world of difference to others. We’ve also improved our readability checks and how we deal with some languages, more on that below.

Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about accessibility and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!!

Accessibility changes

When we hired Andrea a while back (more on that here), we knew we were in for a treat. He’s one of the leading accessibility developers for WordPress, and he didn’t disappoint. This release is, in large part, his work. Improving accessibility means a ton of small changes, and we have the changelog to show for it.

Some simple highlights that show that where accessibility is concerned, the devil is in the details:

• Improved the headings hierarchy on several admin pages.
• Improved the knowledge base search and admin menu by making it focusable and operable with a keyboard.
• Adding labels and titles to several fields.

Readability checks

We’ve added one readability check this release. The plugin now warns you if you start 3 or more consecutive sentences with the same word. We’ve also improved the wording on some checks. Yoast SEO can now deal with characters with diacritics correctly in 75 languages.

The choice is yours!

As of this release you can disable the SEO analysis. You can also disable the readability analysis. You can do this just for yourself, or an admin can do it for an entire site. If you disable both, you’ve got just our snippet preview left. We’d obviously recommend using both features, but if you don’t want to, the choice is now yours!

Update!

We’ve, of course, fixed bugs in Yoast SEO and quite a few of the Yoast SEO extensions too. So… Go update!