Author: Joe Dolson

Many themes do not provide a design for the view of links or other focusable fields when a keyboard user brings focus to that element. This makes it very difficult for visual users who are keyboard dependent to keep track of where they are. A common pattern for this is to change the appearance of […]

A common pattern for WordPress in many views is to show an excerpt of your post with a link to read the entire post. By default, this link is just plain text “more” or “continue reading” or an equivalent. This is problematic for accessibility because it means that there are many links on the same […]

Screen readers use the site’s declared language to figure out what pronunciation rules to use when reading the content. If no language is declared, then the screen reader will generally use the screen reader user’s installation’s language or try to guess: e.g., if a French user of a screen reader visits your page, and no […]

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 […]

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. Following the release of WordPress 6.5, WP Accessibility contains an option to disable this […]

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 […]

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 […]

WP Accessibility adds a column to the media library list view to identify images with missing or inadequate alt attributes. The tests include:

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.

Since WordPress 5.4, the block editor has opened to the fullscreen mode by default. Since this information is stored only as a local setting, this will happen for users every time they open the editor on a device where they haven’t previously configured their preferences, if they reset their local storage, or when setting up […]

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 […]

The default WordPress behavior when a search is submitted with an empty search field is to simply return the main index with no notice at all. This is disorienting and confusing. The plug-in will change this so that the submission of an empty search field will return the same as a search with no results, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Links opened in new windows can break web site flow (creating a change of context) and disorient users who don’t realize they’ve moved to a new window. Also, it takes away the option of opening in the same window/tab: all browsers have an option to open links in a new tab, few have an option […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

While not a solution in itself, if your theme has low contrast issues or small fonts, using this custom control to toggle high-contrast or large font modes can be useful. All styles can be customized or extended within your theme directory, since default states for these tools may not be suitable for your site. The […]

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 […]

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 […]