WordPress Accessibility – A Complete Guide to Accessible WordPress Websites

WordPress powers over 43% of all websites, making it one of the most influential platforms on the internet. With such a large share of the web, WordPress accessibility is crucial for inclusivity, user experience, and compliance with accessibility laws.

In this guide, you will learn how to ensure your WordPress website is accessible. We will cover selecting the right themes and plugins, running accessibility tests, and maintaining compliance so you can create a site that works for everyone.

How Accessible Is WordPress as a CMS Tool?

WordPress is reasonably accessible as a CMS, but not fully.

The W3C has an accessibility standard for CMS tools like WordPress called the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) (opens in a new tab), which ensures both the tool itself is accessible and that it helps authors create accessible content.

WordPress aims to meet ATAG 2.0, but it does not currently do so. As a result, people with disabilities may still struggle to create or edit content in WordPress. For example, certain editing tasks can be difficult to complete without a mouse.

The biggest challenge is the Gutenberg block editor. While it offers powerful editing options, it was released with significant accessibility issues. Thankfully, WordPress has a dedicated accessibility team, and they are actively working to make the tool more accessible.

How Accessible Is a WordPress Website Out of the Box?

Out of the box, how accessible a WordPress site is depends mainly on its themes and plugins.

Themes control the appearance of your website, while plugins add functionality to it. Both are responsible for the underlying code that makes up the front end of your site. That code can be accessible or have accessibility issues.

So with an accessibility-ready theme and plugins that follow best practices, your site starts with a strong foundation for accessibility and usability. But a poorly coded theme or plugins that ignore accessibility can quickly create issues for people with disabilities.

What Are the Best Accessible Themes for WordPress?

WordPress has a range of accessibility-ready free themes (opens in a new tab) designed to meet basic accessibility requirements. These are marked with the “Accessibility Ready” tag in the official theme directory, indicating they have been vetted and tested for accessibility.

Also, there are paid themes that receive more effort, attention, support, and ongoing updates, often with a stronger focus on meeting WCAG accessibility standards. If your website is important to your business or brand, investing in a paid theme may be a better choice.

Here’s a list of both free and paid accessibility-ready WordPress themes you can consider.

Free Accessibility-Ready Themes	Paid Accessibility-Ready Themes
Twenty Twenty-Four	Icelander
Twenty Twenty-One	Avada
Neve	Cindy
pally	Astra
Greyd WP	Genesis Framework

How to Choose an Accessible Theme for WordPress

Choosing the right theme is one of the most important steps in building an accessible WordPress website. A theme controls the design, layout, and underlying code of your site, which directly affects how usable it is for people with disabilities.

When selecting a theme, keep these points in mind:

• Check colour contrast and typography for readability.
• Test keyboard navigation to ensure menus and forms work without a mouse.
• Review with a screen reader to confirm content is read in the right order.
• Read user reviews to see if others mention accessibility problems.

No theme is perfectly accessible out of the box, but starting with one that follows accessibility best practices will give your site a strong foundation. You can then review, test, and adjust it to ensure it meets accessibility standards for your specific content and setup.

You’ll find recommended testing methods later in this article.

How to Build an Accessible Theme

As we discussed earlier, themes play a major role in accessibility. If you’re creating a custom WordPress theme, build it with accessibility in mind, because both your design and code choices directly affect how accessible your website will be.

We recommend starting custom development with a foundation like the Underscores starter theme (opens in a new tab). While it doesn’t offer much in terms of design, it provides a solid base for clean, semantic HTML (opens in a new tab), which is a huge part of what makes a site accessible.

Whether you’re creating a theme from scratch or customising an existing one, we recommend following these key practices:

	What It Means	Why It Matters
Ensure adequate colour contrast	Text must meet WCAG 2.1 AA contrast ratios (4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text).	Poor contrast makes content unreadable for users with low vision.
Use more than colour to show differences	Add underlines, bolding, or icons instead of relying only on colour.	Color-blind users may miss important information if colour is the only cue.
Support full keyboard navigation	Make sure all menus, forms, and links are reachable and usable with the keyboard.	Many users cannot use a mouse and rely on keyboard navigation.
Build for screen-reader navigation	Include skip links, ARIA roles, landmarks, and descriptive link text.	Screen readers need clear cues to help users jump through content.
Write clean, semantic markup	Use HTML elements for their intended purpose and keep heading order logical.	Semantic code helps assistive technologies interpret the page correctly.
Add text alternatives	Provide alt text for images, captions for videos, and transcripts for audio.	Ensures non-text content is accessible for blind and deaf users.
Allow resizable fonts	Use relative units (em/rem) so text can scale up to 200% without breaking layouts.	Supports users who enlarge text for readability.
Give users control over motion	Add options to pause or stop animations, sliders, or auto-play.	Prevents issues for users with motion sensitivity or attention challenges.

The list above covers the essentials, but it’s not exhaustive. Many other details, big and small, impact your theme’s accessibility. When you start building, we recommend referencing the official WordPress Accessible-Theme Coding Standards (opens in a new tab) for more in-depth guidance.

How to Choose Accessible Plugins for WordPress

While powerful, plugins are a common cause of accessibility issues. Since they add or modify your site’s code, they can easily introduce barriers, such as elements that are not keyboard-friendly, poor colour contrast, or missing ARIA labels.

When selecting plugins:

• Look for documentation that specifically mentions accessibility or WCAG compliance.
• Read user reviews, especially from people who mention the plugin’s accessibility.
• Test before and after installing to confirm the plugin maintains your site’s accessibility.

By following these steps, you can reduce the risk of adding plugins that harm your site’s accessibility. Even good plugins can cause issues if not built with accessibility in mind, so checking, reviewing, and testing keeps your site usable for everyone.

But What About Accessibility Plugins?

Accessibility plugins can be a great help. They can add useful features, improve form labels, enhance navigation, and fix minor accessibility gaps. Plugins such as Accessibility Toolkit by WebYes (opens in a new tab) help address common accessibility issues.

For example, Accessibility Toolkit by WebYes can:

• Add “skip to content” links for faster keyboard access
• Maintain logical keyboard navigation with clear focus indicators
• Label form and search fields for better screen reader support
• Make links stand out clearly and visibly without relying on colour
• Alert users when a link opens in a new tab or window

But no plugin or widget (opens in a new tab) can make your website fully accessible. They can’t fix core accessibility issues in your website. For true accessibility, use these plugins as part of a bigger strategy that includes accessible coding, good design practices, and regular testing.

What Are the Best Accessible WordPress Page Builders?

Page builders like Elementor, Divi, and Beaver Builder make it easy to design custom layouts without touching code. But accessibility can be a challenge. These tools generate a lot of code behind the scenes, and not all of it follows accessibility best practices.

Thankfully, Equalize Digital (opens in a new tab) tested popular page builders and ranked them based on accessibility scores. Here are the best accessible WordPress page builders:

Rank	Page Builder	Accessibility Score (Passing %)
1	Kadence WP	75.95%
2	Elementor	70.13%
3	GeneratePress	67.80%
4	Avada	59.21%
5	Breakdance	54.67%
6	CoBlocks	52.38%
7	SiteOrigin	51.90%
8	Bricks	50.00%
9	Beaver Builder	48.00%
10	Divi	16.22%

How to Test Your WordPress Website for Accessibility

Testing is essential to ensure your WordPress website is truly accessible. Even with an accessibility-ready theme and best practices in place, issues can still appear over time due to design customisations, new content updates, or added plugins.

Your goal should be to test against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which set the international standard for making websites usable for people with disabilities. We recommend aiming for WCAG 2.1 Level AA for a practical balance between usability and effort.

Here are the steps to test your WordPress website for accessibility:

1. Run automated scans to catch common issues
2. Perform manual checks to verify usability
3. Conduct user testing to get real-world feedback

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Run automated scans

Automated scans are the quickest way to flag common accessibility issues.

Tools like WebYes can identify problems such as missing alt text, low colour contrast, and improper heading structure. While these tools are a great starting point, they can only detect a portion of WCAG (opens in a new tab) requirements, so don’t rely on them alone.

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2. Perform manual checks

Manual testing helps you find issues that automated scans miss.

Navigate your site using only a keyboard to ensure all links, buttons, and forms are reachable and usable without a mouse. Use a screen reader to check that your content is read in the correct order, headings are announced properly, and interactive elements have clear labels.

3. Conduct user testing

User testing provides insights you can’t get from tools alone.

Involve people who rely on assistive technologies, such as screen readers or alternative input devices, to interact with your site. Their feedback can uncover real-world barriers and help you understand how your site works for different users.

How to Make Content in WordPress Accessible

Even if you choose the right theme and plugins, accessibility can still break down if the content you publish isn’t created with accessibility in mind. So, if you are an author, you need to follow accessibility best practices when writing and formatting your content.

Here are four key practices to keep in mind:

1. Use proper headings to structure your content clearly.
2. Add descriptive alt text to images so screen readers can explain them.
3. Write meaningful link text instead of “click here” or “read more.”
4. Keep your writing clear and simple with short sentences and paragraphs.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

1. Use proper headings

Headings provide structure to your page and help screen reader users navigate quickly. If you skip levels or use headings only for styling, people relying on assistive technology may lose the logical flow of your content and struggle to find what they need.

2. Add descriptive alt text

Alt text (opens in a new tab) tells users who cannot see the image what it represents. Without it, screen readers will only announce “image” or read out the file name, which gives no context. This can make key information invisible to some visitors.

3. Write meaningful link text

Links should describe their purpose on their own. If you only use “click here” or “read more,” screen reader users scanning a list of links will have no idea where those links go. That creates confusion and forces extra effort.

4. Keep your writing clear and simple

Clear, straightforward writing helps everyone, especially people with cognitive disabilities or those reading on small screens. If your content is long-winded, full of jargon, or poorly structured, users may give up before they reach the information they need.

How to Make Your WordPress Website Accessible

By now, we’ve looked at the main parts of WordPress that affect accessibility – themes, plugins, content, and testing. Let’s put everything we’ve covered into practice and focus on building accessibility step by step.

1. Start with an accessibility-ready theme or builder
2. Use plugins that follow accessibility best practices
3. Create accessible content
4. Test your site periodically against WCAG 2.1 AA

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Start with an accessibility-ready theme or builder

We’ve already looked at how much themes and page builders influence accessibility. The best starting point is to choose one built with accessibility in mind. We’ve listed some accessible options, but it’s important to do your research and testing to find the one that best fits your needs.

2. Use plugins that follow accessibility best practices

Earlier, we discussed how plugins can harm accessibility. So, research and test before installing one, because the wrong plugin can undo the accessibility work you’ve already done. If no accessible option exists, reach out to the developer about improvements.

3. Create accessible content

As we saw, even the most accessible website can be undermined by inaccessible content. Use proper headings, write descriptive alt text for images, and make sure your link text is meaningful. Plugins like Yoast can help you keep content easy to read and understand.

4. Test your site periodically against WCAG 2.1 AA

We’ve already shared how to test with automated tools, manual checks, and user testing. Accessibility is not a one-time task. Every time you add new content, update a theme, or install a plugin, issues can appear. Regular testing helps you catch and fix them early.

Shape a More Inclusive Web With WordPress

Your WordPress website should be easy to access, navigate, and enjoy for people of all abilities. Making it accessible not only improves the user experience but also expands your reach, strengthens your brand, and helps you meet legal requirements.

You do not have to make every change at once. Start with the basics, like choosing an accessibility-ready theme, using well-built plugins, and running regular accessibility tests. Each improvement you make removes a barrier for someone, making the web a more inclusive place.

The tools, tips, and steps in this guide give you everything you need to begin. Now it is up to you to take action and create a website that truly works for everyone. Act now and show your commitment to an inclusive online experience.

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