Category: Remediation

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]