Enhance the accessibility of your WordPress website with these top 6 plugins designed to cater to diverse user needs, particularly those with disabilities. Discover how these plugins can seamlessly integrate features such as screen readers, large buttons, high contrast colors, closed captions, and image alt attributes, ensuring a more inclusive online experience. Save time and resources by leveraging AI tools and WordPress plugins that automatically optimize your website’s design for enhanced accessibility, allowing you to focus on content creation, social media engagement, and marketing.
What Are WordPress Accessibility Plugins?
To comprehend WordPress accessibility plugins, it’s crucial to grasp the concept of website accessibility. Website accessibility ensures that all internet users can access and interact with content on a portal. This includes navigating through pages, comprehending visual or written content, and participating in content creation.
A website is deemed accessible when individuals with cognitive, auditory, physical, neurological, visual, and speech disabilities can consume its content. To guide website developers in implementing standard accessibility design practices, the W3 Web Accessibility Initiative has established an international policy known as WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines have multiple versions, such as WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, and WCAG 2.2.
For those building websites outside of WordPress, adhering to the web page accessibility design guidelines must be done manually. However, if your website is managed within WordPress, there are automated tools available—commonly referred to as WordPress accessibility plugins—that can format your web portal according to international accessibility standards.
Importance of WordPress Accessibility Plugins?
Numerous strict acts worldwide protect the rights of users with disabilities, ensuring easy access to information technology-based services and products. For instance, the Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design mandates ADA compliance for public-facing IT services, including smartphones and websites.
The EU’s Web Accessibility Directive also requires mobile apps and website developers to create products that adhere to accessibility standards. The key advantage of using accessibility plugins is to ensure compliance with these digital content regulations and guidelines. Additionally, there are other significant benefits, such as:
Website Reputation
If your website has better accessibility ratings, your online reputation increases drastically. Because the users see you as an inclusive business or company, they prefer you over other websites that do not follow the accessibility standards.
Increase Audience
When the website is accessible for users with disabilities, you get web traffic from all the sections of internet consumers. Increased traffic means better conversion probability and ultimately more revenue.
Increase SEO Ranking
It has been observed that if your website follows accessibility guidelines like alt text for images and closed captions for videos, the website performs better than those who do not offer these features.
The followings are some of the best WordPress plugins website owners use to comply with ADA or EU accessibility norms:
One Click Accessibility
If you are the administrator of your WordPress website and seek easy configuration and control of accessibility settings, consider trying One Click Accessibility. This tool provides basic accessibility settings, including ARIA landmarks, outline focus, clearing target attributes for links, and skip links.
Furthermore, its user-friendly accessibility toolbar for WordPress sites allows you to resize fonts, underline links, enable negative contrast, trigger high contrast, and generate site maps. Most importantly, you can visually review the design changes before implementing them online.
One-Click Accessibility not only transforms your WordPress website to comply with accessibility standards but also enhances its SEO-friendliness. The best part is that you can access all these features for free, as it is a free WordPress plugin.
UserWay
UserWay is a globally popular WordPress plugin for accessibility control, and it doesn’t require existing website code refactoring. Additionally, you can access the plugin’s basic widget for free.
The basic widget offers light, accessibility-friendly designs with up to 28 features. While the free option is suitable for a trial, it may not be sufficient for a full-fledged commercial website. UserWay’s accessibility features also enhance website compliance with ATAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, Section 508, and ADA, covering 20% of the requirements on the free plan.
This accessibility plugin incorporates AI that scans your WordPress site for accessibility issues and provides useful recommendations. One notable feature of UserWay is its ability to allow users to navigate your website without using a mouse.
accessiBe
Over 100,000 websites trust accessiBe for compliance with various global accessibility standards. Notable platinum clients, including industry giants like GE, British Airways, Hilton, UCLA, and Patek Philippe, endorse this comprehensive accessibility solution. If you’re seeking an all-encompassing approach to website accessibility, accessiBe is worth considering.
Its AI programming autonomously scans both the back end and front end of your web page to identify and address accessibility issues. This includes rectifying icons, ARIA attributes, image alt texts, and forms. Additionally, the plugin assists in modifying the page structure to enhance keyboard accessibility. The ongoing scanning feature ensures that there is no accessibility settings mismatch between old and new content.
accessiBe utilizes at least two distinct programs to meet maximum accessibility standards. The GUI accessibility interface controls the design and user interface (UI) elements of your website, adhering to WCAG 2.1 guidelines. Simultaneously, the AI accessibility tool operates in the background, handling queries from differently-abled users seeking full keyboard-based navigation or screen reader support.
WP Accessibility Tools
The WordPress.org portal provides reliable, efficient, and user-friendly accessibility plugins, and one standout option from the WordPress plugins portal is WP Accessibility Tools & Missing Alt Text Finder. As an open-source project, this plugin is freely available, allowing you to enhance your website without any cost.
The dedicated development team actively monitors the plugin for bugs and consistently releases updates. The latest version, 1.4, reflects their commitment to regular improvements, with updates occurring every few months. Compatibility is robust, spanning various WordPress versions from 4.8 and above, and it has been tested on WordPress 5.8.4. The plugin is also compatible with PHP version 5.3 and higher. With over 4,000 active installations, it has earned a 5-star rating.
While the plugin primarily focuses on helping you achieve ADA Section 508 compliance, it also comes with an automated checklist to highlight shortcomings preventing WCAG 2.1 compliance. This makes it a valuable accessibility settings auditor, providing suggestions for fixes that can be implemented by you or a website developer. In addition to auditing, the plugin offers the following instant fixes:
- Insertion of description text, caption text, and alt text for images individually or with a single click.
- Inbuilt contrast ratio checker.
Although the plugin doesn’t offer an extensive range of features, its open-source nature makes it a valuable tool, and you can complement it with other fixes to achieve accessibility compliance.
Equalize Digital
Equalize Digital is another trusted tool for accessibility checking and fixing. You can get its free or paid accessibility audit tool to understand WordPress website issues. Then, you can sit with a developer to fix those. Or you can also get an accessibility design remediation service from Equalize Digital to make your website compliant with various accessibility standards.
The accessibility audit performs tasks like issue scanning, monitoring for performance optimization, and reporting the accessibility status of the web portal. In addition, the scanning works in real-time, which means you do not need to stop uploading content, changing themes, or adding plugins, since the tool keeps on checking every change on the website.
Accessibility Suite
Accessibility Suite also comes from the WordPress.org portal and bears a 4-star rating on the plugin store of WordPress. As per the WordPress plugin portal, the tool has been tested up to the WordPress CMS version 5.8.4. So far, the tool has managed to secure more than 1,000 active installations.
This accessibility plugin is essentially an auditing tool. So, you can use its WordPress scanner to pinpoint accessibility issues according to several international standards like ADA, Section 508, and WCAG. However, you will need to get in touch with a developer to fix those or rely on another WordPress plugin for fixes.
Conclusion
The significance of website accessibility has grown as an essential characteristic for public-facing web pages and portals. Furthermore, if a website’s revenue is reliant on traffic, it is imperative to adhere to accessibility standards in order to appeal to a wide-ranging audience.
Contemporary developers prioritize accessibility features and tackle related issues during the initial stages of development projects. Additionally, website owners engage developers for ongoing site maintenance and addressing accessibility concerns in response to updates and new content.
For those utilizing WordPress, there is a distinct advantage over users of other platforms. There is no need to enlist a developer to resolve accessibility issues; instead, you can effortlessly utilize any of the aforementioned tools to ensure that your website is accessible to users with different abilities.
