WordPress Accessibility Best Practices for an Inclusive Web

Every visitor is not equally privileged. Some rely on assistive technologies that limit their access to your site if it’s not designed with accessibility in mind. They also deserve a smooth browsing experience like others.

To ensure inclusivity for all users, you need to create a website by following WordPress Accessibility best practices. This approach warmly embraces every visitor, including those with physical impairments, and ensures your site is easy to navigate, read, and interact with.

In this blog, we’ll explore the best practices for WordPress accessibility and guide you on how to make your site inclusive and welcoming for all.

What is WordPress accessibility?

Accessibility in WordPress refers to designing a website that anyone can easily interact with and navigate, regardless of their physical disabilities. In short, accessibility involves building a site following web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) to ensure a more inclusive web experience.

Why accessibility matters for WordPress sites?

Audience might face visual, physical, or auditory challenges, which makes your site difficult to browse. According to research by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2022, around 14 percent of people in the USA have some kind of disability.

These fourteenth percent are also included in your target audience. So, there is no way to ignore these people. Web accessibility improves website accessibility for these physically challenged people.

Here are more reasons why accessibility is important for your WordPress site:

• Web accessibility helps to atingir um público mais amplo by creating a friendly digital environment for all audiences, including people who face accessibility challenges.
• Web accessibility assists to maintain a friendly user experience for all, including impaired people.
• Accessibility creates a professional and credible business website in WordPress.
• This improves website visibility, which positively contributes to SEO.
• Your website will be equally accessible to all users.
• This allows you to build and run a site, maintaining website compliance and standards.

Best practices for implementing accessibility in WordPress

Here are the key practices to make your WordPress website more accessible and compliant for modern web standards:

Audit to check accessibility

First, you need to examine the entire site and flag accessibility issues such as not having meaningful alt text for images, text that is too small, using a difficult-to-read format, etc. Besides, audit the navigation menu and mark out all the issues that deteriorate the browsing experience.

Also, accessibility checks of your WP forms, plugins, and themes should be included in this audit. Moreover, consider accessibility audits in website design and ensure that format, text, buttons, etc. are readable and visible. Every part of your website should be carefully inspected.

Use accessible themes, plugins, and forms

While selecting WordPress themes, plugins, and form builders, make sure they are built following the accessibility guidelines (WCAG). Again, it should be optimized for screen readers. Plugins you consider should be coded, maintaining web accessibility.

If they don’t follow web accessibility, then there are chances that your headings, forms, navigation menu, modal popups, etc. added through those plugins are not accessible as well. So, thoroughly test the theme, plugin, and form builder’s accessibility before picking one.

➡️ Learn more how to design accessible forms in WordPress.

Craft accessible content

Accessibility is not limited to website design. Your website content also lies in this accessibility guideline. For example, your website content has to be concise and easy to understand. Besides, you should adopt the following guidelines while crafting accessible content:

• Use proper headings (H1, H2, H3,…) to organize your content.
• Add meaningful alt text to your website images.
• Use suitable captions for website videos.

Besides, you also need to consider the web content accessibility Guidelines while writing content for your site.

Focus on color contrast and readability

The right color contrast enhances your web content’s readability even for people who are struggling with low vision and color blindness. Keep at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio between text and background color while designing your WordPress site. For smaller text, it will be 7:1.

Again, use sufficient line spacing and legible fonts. You should use decorative fonts only in large headings. After implementation, verify your color combination with the Contrast Checker tool.

Resolve accessibility challenges in WordPress

After finding out all the accessibility challenges, you have to resolve them one by one. For instance, if your used plugins and themes are inaccessible, then replace them with accessible ones.

Also, you can use accessibility plugins for fast scanning, quick improvements, e fixing common accessibility issues. The door to manual updating to fix accessibility shortcomings is also open. 

Regular testing and updating

Accessibility is an ongoing process where you need to keep yourself and your team updated with WCAG standards, conduct regular audits with automated tools and manual reviews.

You should always train your design and content team to prepare websites following up-to-date accessibility guidelines. Monitoramento contínuo e updating will help you keep your site compliant.

Common accessibility mistakes in WordPress

Here is the list of the most commonly found accessibility mistakes in WordPress websites:

• Improper alt text: Not adding related and descriptive alt text to images makes them inaccessible for search engines and screen readers. 
• Bad color contrast: Using poor color contrast between text and background is a frequently made mistake that can reduce readability.
• Broken link: A Broken link or 404 error will lead your audience to a dead end. This is a regular mistake made in WP sites. 
• Wrong heading hierarchy: Wrong heading order can confuse readers. So, ensure the right heading order throughout your content.
• Inaccessible theme, plugin, and  form builder: Check accessibility support while selecting themes, plugins, and form builder for your WordPress site.
• No backup: Forgetting to have a backup for your WordPress site is threatening for your resources. 
• Missing proper caption for multimedia content: Multimedia content, such as videos without captions, is inaccessible for users with hearing impairment.
• Non-descriptive hyper text: Adding short hyper text like read more, click here, etc. provides unclear content ideas to your audience.

➡️ Check out proven page speed optimization strategies.

Empacotando

Making your site accessible is a commitment to equally serving your audience. Implementing WordPress accessibility is not just about better user experience; it is about breaking barriers against impairment and ensuring people with disabilities can navigate your site with ease. 

Following these WCAG standards is easy through regular auditing, using accessible themes and plugins, maintaining proper content structure, testing, and updating. This helps to create a website that welcomes everyone.

So, start adopting these WordPress accessibility best practices and get closer to building a website that is open for all.