The icons you see every time you log into WordPress, the ones in the black admin bar and the left-hand sidebar menu, are getting a makeover.

What happened

A patch in progress since June proposes replacing Dashicons, the icon font WordPress has used in wp-admin for years, with SVG-based WordPress icons in the admin bar and sidebar menu. According to the announcement on the Make WordPress Core blog, the change uses wp_get_icon(), a function introduced in WordPress 7.1 for rendering icons as SVG instead of font glyphs. The work is tracked in Trac ticket #65089, with a pull request already open for review. Contributors fushar, wildworks, and lucasmdo have been driving it forward.

No icon shapes are changing dramatically. The visual language stays similar, but the underlying technology switches from a font to individual SVG images.

Why it matters

Dashicons is an icon font, meaning each icon is really a text character mapped to a private code point that has no defined meaning outside WordPress. That causes real problems:

  • Screen readers handle it inconsistently. Some announce nothing, some read a nonsense character, and some read a random piece of punctuation out loud mid-sentence.
  • High contrast mode breaks it. Windows High Contrast Mode and other forced-color settings often make font-based icons vanish or render incorrectly, because the operating system treats the icon as text.
  • Failed font loads look broken. If the icon font is blocked or loads slowly, the icons show up as confusing empty boxes instead of failing gracefully.

SVG icons drawn with currentColor follow whatever color a user has chosen, and they can carry an explicit aria-label so screen readers announce something predictable every time.

What this means for your site

Nothing changes on your site today. This is still a patch under active review, with some details still being worked out, including the direction of the search icon and which icon best represents the Posts menu item. But because the change touches the admin bar and sidebar that every logged-in user sees, expect it to land as a visible update once it ships in a future WordPress core release.

If you or your team rely on screen readers, high contrast mode, or other accessibility settings to manage your site, this is a fix worth watching for. It won’t change how you use wp-admin, but it should make the icons there more reliable and easier to understand.

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