We have been working hard over the last few months to make Select2 more accessible as well as remove a lot of technical debt that was included in the 4.0.x series of Select2. With this release we believe Select2 should be considerably more accessible by screen readers, both in the selection area and in the dropdown area. This has benefits for everyone, but also puts developers using Select2 in environments requiring WCAG compliance in a better position.

Additionally many of the backwards compatibility shims that were provided for the 3.5.x to 4.0.0 migration have been removed, with a few exceptions of some which were promoted into the core of Select2. Support for browsers older than Internet Explorer 11 has officially been removed, which means that support for ancient browsers such as IE 8 - 10 is now no longer guaranteed. We held out for half a decade longer than most, but at this point it looks like we are safe to do this. Finally.

All of this comes together to make Select2 a better plugin for millions of people to use, both developers and users that interact with Select2 on a daily basis.