Beta release of Blockly v13 is now available

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Aaron Dodson

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May 15, 2026, 2:49:49 PM (3 days ago) May 15
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The Blockly team is please to announce the availability of a new beta of v13. v13 is an upcoming major new release focused on improving accessibility for individuals with motor and visual impairments.

Blockly v13 can be used entirely via the keyboard, and automatically provides descriptions of all interactable elements to screenreaders. We have conducted extensive user research in collaboration with a number of Blockly Accessibility Fund grant recipients in order to validate the new interaction models.

We will release v13.0.0 within the next two weeks. Your feedback is very much appreciated! A complete changelog is available below; to try out the accessibility features:
  • Click on the workspace or press tab to move focus through the page to the workspace.
  • Press T to open the toolbox and use the arrow keys to select a block.
  • Press enter to insert the block.
  • Repeat to build a program.
  • Use the arrow keys to navigate to a field and press enter to edit the field value.
  • With a block selected, press M to enter move mode and use the arrow keys to change its position on the workspace.
Screenreaders will announce relevant information as you navigate the workspace, and there are additional shortcuts to provide more information for screenreader users. You can also press Command Option Z / Control Alt Z (subject to change) to enable "screenreader optimized mode" which provides additional audio cues as you navigate. Keyboard navigation can be used interchangeably with the mouse.

This release does include a number of breaking changes, mostly in the form of additional keyboard shortcuts and some API changes to interfaces that heavily customized Blockly integrations may need to implement. We have also provided additional APIs to customize and enhance screenreader descriptions of custom blocks and fields. Although we don't suggest updating production services until the final release is available, we encourage you to try updating to this version and begin development work towards integrating it with your app or service.

Extensive documentation will be made available soon, and, although the various plugins in the blockly-samples repository have not yet been updated for compatibility, we will be doing so shortly after v13 is released.

Changelog
Breaking changes 🛠
New features ✨
Bug fixes 🐛
New Contributors

Adam Bryant

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May 17, 2026, 3:54:18 AM (yesterday) May 17
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I hope you will be removing the need for NPM due to the latest known problems with NPM.
I have also had dev complaining that its to complicated to install NPM and its associated files just to access the source.

Aaron Dodson

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1:42 PM (4 hours ago) 1:42 PM
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To be clear, Blockly does not currently require NPM, and we're not changing that; you can download releases from Github and use them directly without the need for NPM or any other package manager. We do generally recommend using a package manager since most projects these days already have one and it tends to make upgrading somewhat easier, but it's not mandatory.

Adam Bryant

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2:43 PM (3 hours ago) 2:43 PM
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Thats another part of the guide that needs updating as it was saying to use NPM.

Thank you for the update.

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