Accessibility is a critical component of creating inclusive and user-friendly digital environments. Ensuring websites you build are accessible is not just a moral and ethical imperative, but often a legal and business necessity. In this article, we discuss why accessibility matters, some of the key features to look for in an accessibility solution, and look at some of the plugins available to help you make sure the sites you build can serve all parts of their potential audience.
Why Accessibility Matters
Accessibility in web design is not just a moral or ethical imperative, but a critical aspect of creating an inclusive and user-friendly digital environment. Depending on your jurisdiction, there may be legal considerations as well. The upside is that making a website accessible tends to enhance the overall user experience for everyone. There are often business benefits as well.
Legal frameworks such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the USA, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) internationally, mandate that digital spaces be accessible to everyone. Compliance with these regulations is essential to avoid legal penalties and to reflect a commitment to fairness and inclusivity.
Business Benefits
An accessible website enhances a company’s reputation by demonstrating a commitment to inclusivity and social responsibility. This approach can differentiate a brand, attracting a broader audience and improving customer loyalty. Accessible websites also tend to perform better in search engine rankings, as search engines favor sites that serve a wider audience and have well-structured, semantic content.
Enhanced User Experience
Accessibility is not limited to users with disabilities; it improves the overall user experience for everyone. Principles of accessible design, such as clear navigation, sufficient color contrast, and the ability to adjust text size, make the web more usable for all. Features like captions for videos are beneficial in noisy or quiet environments, and keyboard navigation can be helpful when the mouse is not working.
Broader Reach and Usability
By designing with accessibility in mind, you can extend the site’s reach to a wider audience. For example, a site that is accessible on different devices and in different lighting conditions can be used more easily by a broader range of people.
Core Principles of Accessible Design
The foundation of accessible web design is built on four key principles: Perceivability, Operability, Understandability, and Robustness.
- Perceivability: Ensures that web content is presented in a way that can be perceived by all users. This includes providing alternatives for non-text content, ensuring sufficient color contrast, and allowing users to customize the presentation of content.
- Operability: Focuses on making web interfaces navigable and operable for all users. This includes keyboard accessibility, avoiding design elements that may cause adverse reactions, and ensuring all interactive elements are accessible via keyboard or alternative input methods.
- Understandability: Ensures that the content is clear and easy to understand. This involves using clear and consistent navigation, providing clear feedback messages, and structuring content in a logical and easy-to-follow manner.
- Robustness: Ensures that the content can be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This involves using semantic HTML and ensuring that the site remains accessible across different devices and browsers.
Key Features
When it comes to choosing an accessibility plugin for your WordPress site, there are several key features that should be considered. We should note that a plugin that doesn’t have one or more of these features may still be the best choice for your situation. Carefully weigh the pros and cons of every plugin, and pick the one that best suits your project’s needs.
Accessibility Toolbars and Customization Options
An accessibility toolbar can be a game-changer for users. Look for plugins that offer toolbars with features like font size adjustment, high contrast modes, and color scheme changes. These tools allow users to customize the site’s appearance to suit their needs, making the content more readable and accessible.
Keyboard Navigation
Ensuring that your site is navigable via keyboard is crucial for users with motor impairments or those who simply prefer using their keyboard. Features that enhance keyboard navigation, such as adding outlines to the keyboard focus state and removing unnecessary tab index attributes, can significantly improve the user experience.
Screen Reader Optimization
For users who are visually impaired or rely on screen readers, it’s essential that your site provides the necessary cues and descriptions. Features like automatic alt text generation, ARIA attributes, and behavior adjustments can help screen readers interpret the site correctly. This includes support for elements like drop-downs, forms, and pop-ups.
Skip Links and Navigation Aids
Skip links allow users to bypass navigation menus and jump directly to the main content of the page. This is particularly useful for screen reader users and those who use keyboard navigation.
Image Accessibility
Images without alt text can be a significant barrier for users with visual impairments. Ensure the plugin you choose can enforce alt attributes for images, identify images without alt text, and provide long descriptions for images when necessary.
Form and Link Accessibility
Accessible forms and links are vital for a seamless user experience. Features that add labels to standard form fields, remove redundant title attributes, and ensure links are properly formatted can make a big difference. Also, look for plugins that prevent links from opening in new windows without warning, which can be disorienting for some users.
Content Summaries and Readability
Providing content summaries at the top of posts and pages can help screen reader users decide whether to read the entire article. Additionally, features that simplify content structure and improve readability can benefit all users.
Plugins
Below are some of the most popular WordPress accessibility plugins. This isn’t an area where a “one size fits all” solution really exists. You’ll have to carefully choose the plugin that’s best for your needs and the needs of the specific project. As always with articles like this, a plugin’s inclusion in this section does not constitute an official endorsement. Remember to do your research before you make any commitments.
WP Accessibility
WP Accessibility is a plugin designed to address common accessibility issues in WordPress themes and core, though it is not intended to make your site fully compliant with accessibility guidelines.
WP Accessibility helps with various theme-related issues, such as adding skip links with customizable targets and appearance, and adding language and text direction attributes to your HTML if they are missing. It also adds an outline to the keyboard focus state for focusable elements, which is particularly helpful for users who rely on keyboard navigation.
The plugin enhances image accessibility by enforcing alt attributes for images in the Classic editor and identifying images without alt attributes in the Media Library. It adds long descriptions to images using the image’s “Description” field and labels to standard WordPress form fields like search and comments. Additionally, it adds post titles to “read more” links and removes tabindex from focusable elements.
WP Accessibility also fixes some WordPress core accessibility issues, such as forcing a search page error when a search is made with an empty text string, removing redundant title attributes from tag clouds, and disabling the default enabling of the full-screen block editor.
The plugin includes useful tools like a color contrast tester, diagnostic CSS to show CSS-detectable problems, and a search function for alt text fields in the Media Library. All features can be disabled according to your theme’s needs, and advanced users can customize stylesheet modifications using their own custom styles.
Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker
The Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker plugin provides real-time accessibility error and warning notifications on your post and page edit screens. Every time you save a draft or publish content, the plugin automatically scans it against over 40 different accessibility checks aligned with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 success criteria. This gives you a visual overview of how your content stacks up and helps you identify and fix issues promptly.
For each error or warning flagged, the plugin lists the specific code that triggered the issue, categorizing them as errors or warnings based on their severity. This allows you to prioritize your fixes effectively. Detailed documentation is available to guide you through the process of addressing these issues, and personalized accessibility remediation assistance and consulting are also offered if needed.
One of the key benefits of the Accessibility Checker is its ability to ensure ongoing compliance with ADA, Section 508, AODA, and WCAG guidelines. It helps content managers and contributors confirm that their content is entered in an accessible manner without needing to be accessibility experts. The plugin includes readability analysis and auto-insertion of simplified summaries, which meet the WCAG Success Criterion 3.1.5 for Reading Level.
The Pro version of the plugin offers additional features such as bulk scanning of all posts and pages, scanning of custom post types, and the ability to see the accessibility status of posts and pages at a glance through admin columns. It also includes a centralized list of all open issues, an ignore log to track ignored errors and warnings, and user role restrictions to control who can ignore errors and warnings.
AccessibleWP – Accessibility Toolbar
The AccessibleWP – Accessibility Toolbar plugin allows you to add an accessibility toolbar to your site, making it easier for users with disabilities to navigate and interact with your content.
The toolbar includes several key options. It enables users to navigate the site using their keyboard, which is helpful for those who cannot use a mouse, as well as folks who simply prefer keyboard navigation. End users can also disable CSS3 animations, which can be distracting. The toolbar offers a dark contrast mode, allowing users to change the site colors to those with dark contrast, and you can customize these colors to your preference.
Additionally, the toolbar allows users to increase or decrease the font size, making the content more readable. It also enables users to change the font-family to a more readable font, with the option to choose the specific font. The plugin highlights titles on the page, making it easier for users to understand the content structure, and marks all links, helping users distinguish between links and regular text.
It’s important to note that AccessibleWP – Accessibility Toolbar does not cover all the guidelines required by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The plugin is designed to help you reach better accessibility but does not guarantee full compliance.
Accessibility by UserWay
Accessibility by UserWay is designed to simplify and enhance the accessibility of your WordPress site, making it more compliant with various accessibility standards and regulations.
The plugin makes modifications to elements on your site that are identified as non-compliant, ensuring that your site adheres to keyboard-only navigation and ADA regulations. It’s particularly effective in strengthening any areas that may violate ADA and WCAG 2.1 guidelines, helping you move closer to full compliance.
It has the ability to offer user-triggered accessibility enhancements. Users can toggle between different contrast levels, enhancing visibility, and making text and elements more distinguishable. The plugin also includes a screen reader that provides auditory feedback for on-screen content, reads aloud text and descriptions, and navigational elements, helping ensure all users can engage with and understand the content.
Additionally, the plugin allows users to adjust font size, choose from various font types, and adjust line-height and letter spacing for better readability. It also offers keyboard navigation, text-to-speech functions, and the ability to highlight key areas of the webpage, such as links and headings, to improve user focus and ease of navigation.
WP Tota11y
WP Tota11y is a WordPress plugin developed by Khan Academy, designed to help identify and address accessibility issues on your website.
WP Tota11y integrates the Tota11y accessibility visualization toolkit directly into your WordPress site, providing real-time feedback on accessibility issues. A small glasses icon added to the bottom left of your page reveals seven accessibility testing options, including one experimental feature, when clicked.
It offers visual aids to help you identify various accessibility barriers, such as incorrect heading levels, color contrast issues, poor link text, missing labels in form elements, and missing alt text in images. It also includes an experimental screen reader wand that views elements as a screen reader would, giving you a clear understanding of how your site interacts with assistive technologies.
WP Tota11y can also be enabled on the back end of your site, making it possible to test the accessibility of plugin and theme options, which is particularly useful for theme and plugin developers.
The plugin also highlights relevant code and suggests how to fix identified issues, making it easier for you to enhance the overall accessibility of your WordPress site.
Conclusion
Incorporating accessibility into your WordPress sites enhances the overall user experience for everyone. By understanding the core principles of accessible design, you can ensure your sites comply with best practice, while also improving your site’s reputation and search engine rankings.
What’s your experience with accessible web design and accessibility plugins? Do you have a favorite that we missed? Let us know in the comments.