How to Learn About Accessibility Best Practices in WordPress

When it comes to accessibility in WordPress, you’ll find thousands of resources—blog posts, videos, podcasts, courses, infographics—to help you learn about WordPress accessibility.

I know, I’ve published several posts and given WordPress accessibility presentations myself.

But as with all things WordPress, the wordpress.org site is the source you want to visit to learn how you can make your WordPress site accessible to everyone.

Thanks to Sami Keijonen for his tweet earlier today, reminding Twitter users of the excellent WordPress Accessibility handbook resource:

WordPress Accessibility Handbook

Created by the WordPress Accessibility Team, a group of volunteers dedicated to improving accessibility within WordPress, the handbook shares best practices and guidance for everyone using WordPress.

No matter whether you’re a user, designer, or developer, you’ll find useful tips to improve your design, coding, and content on your site.

In addition, you’ll find tools and resources create more accessible WordPress sites.

The handbook consists of 11 chapters (as of January 21, 2019):

  1. Best practices
  2. Development best practices
  3. Content best practices
  4. Design best practices
  5. Test for web accessibility
  6. Tools
  7. Get Involved
  8. The Accessibility Team
  9. Report accessibility issues
  10. Themes
  11. Guidelines

The handbook is all online, you can easily navigate from one chapter or section to another.

My Favorite Sections

Readability section of the WordPress Accessibility Handbook.

I’ve read through the handbook more than a dozen times, but keep returning to three sections.

Why?

Because they’re the sections I share repeatedly with our West Metro Detroit WordPress and Metro Detroit WordPress meetup members as well as my clients.

My favorite sections in the handbook are:

  1. Quick start guide in the Best practices chapter, which explains accessibility standards (like semantic HTML) as well as how to implement the standards on your site
  2. Readability section in the Content best practices chapter: much of my time spent on creating and updating existing sites is to educate my clients about making content easy to read and scannable.It’s a common issue I’ve seen in my 20+ years of creating websites.
  3. Guidelines explaining the accessibility standards used in WordPress code as well as how they apply to meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Wrapping Up

If you’re interested in learning how to create a more accessible WordPress site (and I hope you are!), there’s no better place to begin your journey than the WordPress Accessibility Handbook.

Whether you’re a WordPress user, designer, or developer, the handbook offers coding techniques, writing advice, and design guidelines that will improve accessibility on your site.

And for anyone interested in contributing, check out how you can get involved with WordPress accessibility.

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About the Author

Deborah Edwards-Oñoro enjoys birding, gardening, taking photos, reading, and watching tennis. She's retired from a 25+ year career in web design, usability, and accessibility.