WordPress Accessibility Day is a 24-hour global event dedicated to accessibility best practices, specifically for WordPress websites. Started in 2020 by the WordPress core Accessibility Team, this event has since become an independent initiative organized by volunteers. In a nutshell, accessibility is the practice of making something usable by as many people as possible. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 1 in 6 people experience significant disability.
That’s a big chunk of the population, but it only tells part of the story. The other five people will almost certainly experience disability as they age. As Maria Town, President and CEO of American Association of People with Disabilities, put it on an episode of the LGBTQ&A podcast, “everyone will become disabled if they’re lucky enough.”
What is WordPress Accessibility Day?
The annual WordPress Accessibility Day helps to demystify website accessibility for WordPress developers, designers, content creators, and users. Individual sessions equip you with the knowledge and skills necessary to build websites that are accessible to everyone, regardless of their abilities.
During the event, attendees had the opportunity to engage with a single track of presentations featuring speakers from around the world. The event was free to register for, and attendees could watch live streams of the talks. To ensure inclusivity, the organizers provided live captioning and American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation for those who needed these services.
Recordings of the presentations will be made available on the WP Accessibility Day YouTube channel with corrected captions and full transcripts.
Check out the 2024 schedule for a complete list of this year’s presentations. Many presentations brought a laser focus to a particular topic, for example “Accessibility Challenges with Single Page Applications” or “[Accessible Firebrand: ‘Why can’t I use my brand color there, and if not there, then where?’]” really dig into their respective subject matter and explore it thoroughly. If you’re just starting on your accessibility journey, you’ll get an excellent primer from “How to Remediate Accessibility Issues in WordPress.”
Accessibility Issues
Delivered by Cam Coulter, a Digital Access Specialist at Santa Clara University, the presentation showed us how to identify the source of specific issues (page-level, plugin-level, or theme-level), and some of the ways those issues can be remediated.
Coulter noted that accessibility testing and recommendations are often delivered in technical terms, focusing on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are certainly useful, but the complexity of a typical WordPress site means that resolving accessibility issues may not be as straightforward as simply editing a specific line of code. Instead, it involves a more integrated approach that considers WordPress core, your theme, installed plugins, uploaded media, and individual pages and posts.
Page-Level Issues
Accessibility issues on the page level can include implicit or unnecessary headings, implicit lists, insufficient color contrast, and images where the alt text is either inappropriate or missing completely.
That last one really hits home. Around 2004, I considered alt text to be something that was only useful when the images didn’t display. Even twenty years ago, this was a very rare occurrence. I figured skipping alt text completely was a good way to save myself a few minutes.
It legitimately hadn’t occurred to me that people with visual impairments literally need alt text. Once I understood that, I started using it and haven’t stopped since.
Page-level accessibility issues like this can often be remedied by content creators and editors. When it comes to plugin and theme issues, more technical knowledge may be required.
Plugin Issues
One thing Coulter recommends is sure to find resonance with a lot of WordPress developers: keep your plugins limited and used for specific purposes. Not only does it help prevent “plugin bloat,” a lower number of plugins can make it easier to identify exactly where a plugin-level issue is coming from.
In terms of diagnostics, Coulter noted that “If a plugin adds a component to your site, and if there is an accessibility issue with that specific component, it’s probably a plugin-level issue.”
He also noted that it’s important to make sure you’re using the plugin properly. It’s entirely possible that the plugin has settings you can change for greater accessibility, but these may not be the default settings.
In some ways, this reminds me of my personal issues with alt text. It’s not that I couldn’t use alt text, I just didn’t see a reason to make that part of my default process. All too often, we ignore accessibility not out of malice, but simply because we didn’t think in those terms. We need to do so to ensure that what we make and build can be used by as many people as possible.
Theme Issues
During his presentation, Coulter outlined three different signs that the site’s theme may cause accessibility issues:
Default text color results in insufficient color contrast Inline links use color alone to visually indicate that they are interactive Issues located in your header or footer
He also outlined two methods for dealing with this: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way boils down to making adjustments through the Theme Customizer. The hard way is actually three separate strategies. First, you can reach out to the theme developer to let them know their theme has accessibility issues. You absolutely should do this, but it’s unlikely to produce quick results. Second, you can switch to an accessible theme. Third, you can create a child theme and make it more accessible yourself.
Wrapping Up
I’m still digesting everything I learned at WordPress Accessibility Day, but the overwhelming lesson is simply that greater accessibility is possible when we put in some effort. We owe it to each other to eliminate those barriers whenever we can.
We also owe it to ourselves. Our work should be available to as many people as possible. No site you build will appeal to 100% of people, but we should never let something as simple as insufficiently contrasting text to pare away part of our potential audience.
It’s not just a matter of the audience. Remember, one day we’ll experience disability too–if we’re lucky enough.