Author: Joe Dolson

Add tabindex to elements

WP Accessibility looks for any div or span with role=”button” that does not already have a tabindex value, as well as any a element with role=”button” that has neither a tabindex attribute nor an href attribute. (An anchor without a hyperlink reference is not a link, and is not natively focusable.) Adding the role of […]

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Admin bar log out

WP Accessibility inserts a log out link as a top-level item in the WordPress admin bar. This makes it easier for speech recognition and mobile users to log out, as the profile dropdown log out link can be difficult to reach.

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Allow viewport scaling

There are two meta attributes that can prevent a user from scaling your website when viewing it on a mobile device: user-scalable=”no” and maximum-scale=”1″. WP Accessibility replaces user-scalable=”no” with user-scalable=”yes” and adjusts any maximum scale value below 2.0 with a maximum scale of at least 5.0. This allows users to increase their view of portions […]

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Alt text enforcement

WP Accessibility contains a number of ways to help enforce the use of alt attributes in post content. In the classic editor, images with alt text that is either suspicious or missing will be shown with a label indicating that the image is missing alt text. If the ‘decorative image’ toggle is checked, this rule […]

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Color Contrast Testing

The color contrast testing tool is a reduced-feature implementation of my own color contrast testing tool. Use it to test any pair of colors you’re considering using together. If you’re looking to test the color contrast of your site’s front-end design, a tool like WebAIM’s WAVE toolbar is going to be more effective.

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Display alt attributes

In April 2022, Twitter launched a tool that makes it easy for all users to see when an image has alt text. This has significantly increased overall societal awareness of alt text and how it’s used. It has also resulted in some significant misuse of alternative text for marketing or humor, but the overall impact […]

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Force underlines on links

Some themes define link styles that are nearly or completely indistinguishable from the surrounding text. This can be readily be improved by underlining links. WP Accessibility will ignore any link contained inside a nav region. nav regions are standard containers for navigation menus, and WP Accessibility assumes that these links are generally going to be […]

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Remove tabindex from focusable elements

Many (primarily older) themes had tabindex defined for comment input fields, in particular. Tab indices were part of an early concept for an accessibility feature in HTML, but was quickly demonstrated to cause more problems than it solved. What tabindex does is force keyboard navigation to follow a particular sequence according to the values defined […]

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Remove title attributes

Until version 3.5, WordPress automatically added a title attribute to all inserted images. While this hasn’t been part of core since 2011, there’s still a lot of older content that’s never been updated. In addition to that, many plugins and themes still use the title attribute in numerous inappropriate contexts: input fields, images, links, and […]

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Removed Features

Web accessibility is a dynamic field, and as WordPress and web standards change, features in WP Accessibility are periodically removed. Remove title attributes The only remaining remove title attribute feature is for tag clouds, and that’s only barely relevant. Since WordPress 6.1, tag clouds default to having title attributes disabled, and those title attributes are […]

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Search alt attributes

By default, WordPress media library searches the title, description, and file name. The alt text of a file is not part of the search query, though it can be very useful information when your library includes significant descriptive information about your images in that field. This is an open issue in WordPress core, but is […]

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Skip links

Skip links are a means to help users of screen readers jump from the beginning of a page to another section of the page. Visual users can scan a page quickly to identify the larger sections and skip over large blocks of text or links, but users of screen readers can’t easily do that. Skip […]

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Support for longdesc attributes

The longdesc attribute provides a description field for images that are more information-rich than can be conveyed in an alt attribute, such as in graphs or infographics. This uses the WordPress media library’s “Description” field to generate a page linked to from the longdesc attribute which can describe that image. The description field supports HTML, […]

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Video caption enforcement

As with alt attributes, WP Accessibility will show a label in the editor for any uploaded video that has no captions or subtitles. This does not apply to video embeds, such as those coming from YouTube or Vimeo. While WP Accessibility only shows this notice if neither captions nor subtitles are available, I consider it […]

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WP Accessibility Statistics

Note: you will only get a full picture of WP Accessibility’s actions if you turn on all front-end features available in WP Accessibility. The items in the ‘Testing and Admin Experience’ section are not tracked. What WP Accessibility Collects First, the statistics collection is very private; no personally identifying information is collected. WP Accessibility uses […]

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