Do you want to improve accessibility on your WordPress site? Most of the times accessibility gets neglected in our effort to create more beautiful websites. This creates problems and bad user experience for people with disabilities. In this article, we will show you how to improve accessibility on your WordPress site.
What is Accessibility in Web Design in WordPress?
Accessibility is a term used to describe design techniques that make a product accessible to users with disabilities.
In web design, there are some common best practices that are recommended by experts to make websites more accessible. The same best practices can also be used in your own WordPress website.
By making your website more accessible, you can make it easier for many people to use your website without requiring assistance.
The problem is that most people using WordPress don’t know much about web design, accessibility, or design standards. Majority of the people just install a theme that looks great and helps them do what they want to do. We at WPBeginner are guilty of this too, but we are working on improving things around our site.
Let’s take a look at how you can improve the accessibility of your WordPress site without writing any code.
Improving Accessibility of Your WordPress Site
First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Accessibility plugin.
Upon activation, you need to go to Settings » WP Accessibility to configure the plugin.
The first section is to remove the title attribute from tag clouds and archives. The title attribute is considered to be useless by some accessibility experts. Most screen readers usually ignore the title attribute and instead read the anchor text.
In the next section, you can enable the skip link on your website. A skip link allows users to jump directly to the content. This is an extremely useful feature for people using screen readers. Without a skiplink they will have to hear through lots of things like navigation menus before they can reach the content part.
WP Accessibility provides a variety of accessibility settings, under miscellaneous accessibility settings section. You can go through each option and see if you need it on your site.
Some of these options will be checked by default. These options are removing target attribute from links, force search error on empty search submission, and removing tabindex from focusable elements.
WP Accessibility plugin comes with an accessibility toolbar. Enabling it will add a toolbar on your website where users can resize fonts or view your site in high contrast color mode.
Lastly, you will see the color contrast checker tool. Using this tool, you can test the foreground and background color contrast ratio and whether they match the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You may also want to see our guide on choosing the perfect color scheme for your WordPress site.
You can find out the colors your theme is using in the stylesheet, or you can use Eye Dropper, a color picker extension for Google Chrome.
To learn more about the accessibility features of the plugin, take a look at WP Accessibility Plugins page on WordPress accessibility team website.
We hope this article helped you improve accessibility of your WordPress site. You may also want to check out our guide on how to add breadcrumb navigation links in WordPress.
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Good article, accessebility is definitely something you want to have on the site.
I am getting a bit disappointed and confused that these days it is always suggested that a Word press plugin is needed to do most things in Word Press. At this present time everyone is talking about how important your website speed is, but the more plugins you have installed the slower your website speed is going to be. I would be interested to know some more facts on this subject.
Regards Cliff
Please see our explanation here: How Many WordPress Plugins Should You Install on Your Site?.
This is a great article
I could use some help on the scheduling feature, to allow posts to publish themselves on a certain day and time. I do not seem to be doing it correctly, as this isn’t happening on the date and time I have preset in the settings box.
Please take a look at our guide on how to schedule your posts in WordPress. You may also want to take a look at how to auto-schedule your WordPress blog posts.
The Genesis Framework is said to have very good accessibility. Should I use the plugin anyway?
You can give it a try and see if the plugin makes any recommendations. You still need to choose a combination between functionality, design, accessibility, and usability. It is up to you to decide which recommended accessibility settings you want to implement on your website.
What about using “em” instead of “px” for setting appropriate text height? Is adjusting that parameter included in this plugin?
Many sites (including this one) have what some people would consider difficult to read text because it is too small.
Of course, Chrome and other browsers allow you to magnify (zoom) on pages, but that requires an unnecessary step if sites use “em” to set text height.
Awesome explained….
Thanks for sharing my plug-in! If anybody wants to learn the nitty-gritty details on every feature in the WP Accessibility plug-in, they should read the feature documentation after getting your overview! That’ll help you decide which features you need for your site.
Thanks Joe Dolson for sharing writing this very helpful plugin. We have already linked to the plugin’s documentation in the article.