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Accessibility: Use buttons for Add Themes sorting controls - #12848

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Sukhendu2002:ticket/26504-theme-filter-buttons
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Accessibility: Use buttons for Add Themes sorting controls#12848
Sukhendu2002 wants to merge 1 commit into
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Sukhendu2002:ticket/26504-theme-filter-buttons

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This PR fixes the incorrect semantics of the Add Themes sorting controls. These controls perform JavaScript actions but were marked up as links pointing to #. They are now native buttons, providing the expected keyboard and assistive technology behavior.

The JavaScript selectors and CSS have been updated to support the buttons while preserving the existing behavior and appearance.

This resolves the Add Themes-specific part of #26504.

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/26504


This Pull Request is for code review only. Please keep all other discussion in the Trac ticket. Do not merge this Pull Request. See GitHub Pull Requests for Code Review in the Core Handbook for more details.

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github-actions Bot commented Aug 5, 2026

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Sukhendu2002 marked this pull request as ready for review August 5, 2026 02:25
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The following accounts have interacted with this PR and/or linked issues. I will continue to update these lists as activity occurs. You can also manually ask me to refresh this list by adding the props-bot label.

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Props sukhendu2002.

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@irozum irozum left a comment

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Nice, focused fix — converting the Add Themes sorting controls from <a href="#"> to real <button type="button"> is exactly the kind of scoped, low-risk win ticket #26504 has been looking for, and the JS selector changes from li > a to [data-sort] are a nice touch since they work regardless of the underlying element, keeping the code resilient to future markup changes in this area.

I checked out the branch, ran npm run build:dev (clean) and composer lint:errors on the touched PHP file (no errors); CI is green across the board too. I traced the JS: onSort reads event.target and $(event.target).data('sort'), and since the buttons have no nested markup, event.target still resolves to the button itself, so event delegation isn't broken. The CSS reset (border: 0; background: none; font: inherit;) correctly strips native button chrome before re-adding the border-bottom/hover/focus styling, and the new :focus box-shadow plus transparent outline follows the same Windows High Contrast pattern already used by .filter-links .current. I also grepped for other consumers of .filter-links (Plugin Install, Media list table, updates.js) — none of them are touched by this PR, and the CSS/JS changes here are additive (.filter-links li > a, .filter-links li > button), so those other screens keep working unmodified.

One minor, non-blocking note: this view has no existing JS test harness (no QUnit/e2e coverage for the theme installer's filter/sort behavior either before or after this change), so there's nothing to extend here — just flagging that I didn't find a way to verify the keyboard/focus behavior with an automated test, only by reading the code.

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2 participants