Last week I joined hundreds of WordPress bloggers, designers, developers, digital marketers, and content specialists around the world at WordFest Live 2021, an online celebration of WordPress.
The virtual event spanned multiple time zones with 48 sessions about WordPress and mental health across five tracks.
I focused on accessibility and content sessions, and wanted to make sure I attended Graham Armfield’s So, How Do I Know if my WordPress Website is Accessible?
I know Armfield through the WordPress accessibility community on Twitter.
His presentation focused on the 15-question quick guide he created to help you determine if your website is accessible.
I found the questions in his guide to be very helpful, especially his focus on keyboard accessibility.
Making sure you have keyboard interaction on your site will resolve many accessibility issues.
Here are my notes from his presentation.
So, How Do I Know if My WordPress Site is Accessible?
- Web accessibility is important: accessible features you add to your website help everyone
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a great resource to learn about web accessibility, but they’re long. And can take time to understand.
- Armfield offers a quick guide to common accessibility issues on websites
- Keyboard navigation is crucial for people who can’t or don’t want to use a mouse or touchpad
- Key questions to answer about keyboard interaction on your website: Can you view where keyboard focus is? Can you navigate to all parts of your website with the keyboard?
- Good keyboard access can be found on GOV.UK. Site lacking keyboard access (as of January 2021): Odeon with missing search for keyboard navigation.
- When you tab through a website page, does keyboard order make sense? Or does the order jump illogically across the page.
- Make sure your links look like links. People know links are underlined. If you only use color for links, people with low vision or color blindness will struggle to find links.
- Craft meaningful link text for your links. Avoid “Click here” and “read more” for your link text.
- Provide alternative text for all images. Using the free accessibility testing tool WebAIM WAVE, you can check image alternative text.
- For images that are links, write alternative text for the link destination.
- Caption all your videos, so people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or work in quiet or noisy environments can consume your content
- Write meaningful page titles. Did you know screen readers read out the page title when someone visits the page for the first time?
- Test browser text resizing and zooming to make sure text on your website can be increased to 200% for users
- Code your forms to include labels for fields
- Poor color contrast can make it challenging to read website content. Use a color contrast analyzer or aXe browser extension for Firefox, Edge, or Chrome to check colors on your pages.
The 24-minute captioned video presentation has been published on the WordFest Live site for your viewing.
Armfield is a web accessibility consultant, a WordPress developer, and has published posts about coding forms and image alternative text.
