Many bloggers do not focus on creating content for people with accessibility needs. Improving WordPress accessibility for your site will help bring your content to a wider audience. It will also ensure that no one is excluded from your community. On the whole, WordPress is pretty good where accessibility is concerned. You can check the accessibility score of any site in Chrome Developer Console by analyzing the page with Lighthouse extension.
Improving WordPress Accessibility
The WordPress Accessibility Group has made considerable progress towards ensuring that the world’s most popular content management system is accessible to people with disabilities. But there’s plenty that individual site owners can do to make sure their WordPress sites consider those with visual or mobility impairments. In this article, we like to take a look at five straightforward changes that WordPress site owners can make to improve their site’s accessibility.
1. Don’t Forget About Image Alt Tags
Images are a huge part of modern web design. However, for those with visual difficulties, images without alt tags offer a significantly degraded user experience. Screen readers need a small description for images inserted in webpages so that the listener can understand the content easily. When you upload images to your site, take time to put a brief description in the Alternate text box. There is another motivation for including alt tags for your images. Alt text also helps search engine crawlers to understand the meaning of your images and shows them appropriately in image searches.
Avoid using common text like “Picture” or “Image” and add meaningful alt text for each single image you upload.
2. Implement Sensible Content Hierarchy
Header tags — H1, H2, etc. — don’t exist simply for styling headings. Their primary purpose is to give structure to web pages. Screen readers in particular take advantage of properly laid out header hierarchies. Ideally, you should only have one H1 tag on a page and WordPress by default use the page or post title as H1. So, make ensure that other headers are logically and consistently organized in your content: don’t mix up H2 and H3 tags, for example.
Go to “Outline” view in “Document Overview” section to find any misaligned or empty headings in your content.
Gutenberg editor also makes your task easier with “Heading” block which allows you to switch the heading with few clicks.
3. Use Meaningful Anchor Text
It’s often difficult for people with visual or mobility impairments to click on links in a page. Many use software to extract those links into a separate list that is easier to use. If all of those links have anchor text that say “this” or “click here,” then the usefulness of such technology is undermined — a list of twenty “click here” links is not helpful to anyone. Using meaningful anchor text allows the links to make sense outside of their immediate on-page context.
4. Avoid Animated Flash and Videos
Adobe Flash is already out of use and not supported by modern browsers. So, make sure not use Flash animated content, which is difficult for search engine crawlers to understand as well as cause problems for screen readers. Though videos can help to showcase things easily, you need to provide text or audio transcript to make sure it can reach all audience.
5. Try Accessibility Plugin
There are also few accessibility plugins available in WordPress free plugin repository for you to try. WP Accessibility is one such plugin designed to address number of features that improve user experience for those with accessibility issues. For example, skip links feature help users and screen readers to move to important pieces of content by skipping header navigational links on a webpage (like Immersive Reader mode in Edge browser).
WP Accessibility will also add visual indications of keyboard focus for on-page elements. Many users navigate pages by keyboard rather than mouse, and a visual indicator of focus is essential.
Final Words
Without these simple changes, a WordPress website can be difficult or impossible for people with accessibility problems to use. Consider using these accessibility features so that your WordPress site can provide a great user experience to everyone.
