The goal of website accessibility is to ensure that your website can be navigated easily by as many users as possible. For those in education, this may include laws and/or guidelines that require usability for users who rely on assistive technology. Link

WordPress makes an effort to “follow web design standards and best practices” in regard to accessibility. They also provide a tag for “Accessibility Ready Themes” in their theme repository. It should be noted that even these themes should still be personally vetted for accessibility.

Plugins

We offer two plugins that can assist with making your website more accessible. These plugins can not correct every problem but can correct some common accessibility issues.

Accessibility Plugin
The first, simply titled “Accessibility“, helps remedy many common accessibility problems in many WordPress themes. As noted in the documentation for this plugin, beginning with a theme that is already quite accessible will greatly help your efforts.

Divi Accessibility
The second is related specifically to the Divi theme by Elegant Themes. Divi has become one of the most used themes in the WordPress ecosystem. Many of our users choose to use Divi as their theme. As such, we have built a plugin to extend the accessibility of Divi. This plugin fixes quite a few accessibility issues with the Divi theme. Again, it can not correct every problem automatically, but it is a good starting point.

Tools

Using an accessibility plugin is a great place to start, but there will inevitably still be accessibility issues with any website. For this reason, it is a great idea to use accessibility tools to find errors you can fix manually.

WAVE Web Accessibility Tool
WAVE is a free tool created by WebAIM to test the accessibility of websites. It provides a scan of any URL you enter to test for common accessibility issues. WAVE also offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox for easier testing. Using the WAVE tool is a great way to identify accessibility concerns that you may have overlooked.

Notes

Mac/Safari Accessibility Differences
Apple has made the design choice to use the Tab key to switch between objects rather than links. This is a different approach than the one typically taken by most browsers and should be accounted for as you test the keyboard accessibility of your website. To test the same user experience you would expect in other browsers you can change this setting in Safari under Preferences>Advanced.