Returning to core contributing

With the release of WordPress 6.9, I’m finally returning to the contributing to core. The last time was WordPress 6.5 (I’m genuinely not sure what I did for that one – it certainly wasn’t code related!) and, previous to that, 5.8, which was over 4 years ago.

And this contribution has been quite the journey.

6 years ago I opened a ticket to add a Caps Lock message to the login screen. As I work in Customer Service, the idea of improving a basic source of many support calls, appealed to me. Many people have Caps Lock turned on when they don’t realise, so type in password incorrectly without realising it.

Nothing happened for 3 years and there was flurry of testing, during which time designed were discussed, including accessible colours. It then stopped again until earlier this year. It was then realised that MacOS added this automatically to Safari sites, but not for other browsers, which caused a re-think, as we didn’t want this to be duplicated in those scenarios. Over lots of testing the combinations were fully identified where this new feature could be ignored.

5 months ago then came the main sticking point where it was questioned how useful this actually was. I put in a passioned response which was heard, as it was added to 6.9 and completed.

Here’s an example of what the final version looks like…

One change that has been made since the beginning is that it’s no longer limited to just the login screen – any admin screen with a hidden field will show the same thing (so it will be duplicated in the user profile screen where there are fields for changing your password).

As well as bringing the aforementioned benefits to support desks worldwide, this also has more general accessibility advantages too. It’s a tiny change, though, so isn’t anything you’ll see listed in the “here’s what’s changed” posts.