A higher experience as web designers and builders, we’ve got lots of essential aims — from making sure a net site is cell and desktop friendly, to making sure it is fast, looks good, and is person-friendly. However, an important aspect that can usually be missed is finding the best WordPress accessibility instruments.
Abilities that many people may take for granted without any consideration — like being able to use a mouse to scroll or having the power to see a website correctly — may not be the case for everybody.
Thus, this could be very important to guarantee that our websites are optimized for accessibility so that as many individuals can use them as possible.
People who are visually impaired could not have the flexibility to work together with and use a website with lots of pictures, or individuals who may have problems using a mouse or keyboard may not be capable of interacting properly with your site’s navigation schemes. That is why the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the leading body that develops open standards for the web, came up with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
This is a set of suggestions for making net content and web sites more accessible.
The objective of WCAG is to have websites and internet content include lodging for folks with visible, physical, or cognitive impairments across a large selection of gadgets, from desktops to tablets and cellphones.
Browsing through WCAG 2.1, there are many recommendations and actionable items that net builders ought to do, and it could seem like a daunting task at first. However, there are a number of steps you can start with and take, from understanding what enhancements you can also make to utilizing accessibility-prepared themes and plugins to enhance your site’s accessibility.
Here are five ways you’ll find a way to go about it:
1. Use WAVE (the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) to assess current WordPress accessibility. .
The first query is always the place to begin? You have a website; how can you begin to make it more accessible? Fortunately, there are a number of instruments that can help with precisely that, and my favourite one is WAVE (the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool). All you want to do is type your web site in and WAVE opens up the internet site and annotates for you where it finds accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) errors.
Use this WordPress accessibility device to audit your website before getting started. You can get a myriad of essential information corresponding to detecting contrast points (where there is low distinction between the textual content and background colors).
Detecting issues with alternative text for pictures (alternative textual content is a description of the photographs or what is displayed if pictures can’t load), showing empty links (where a hyperlink doesn’t comprise text), and more!
It also tells you what accessibility options your webpage has, giving you an excellent baseline to work up from. And the most effective half is, all of those are annotated on the webpage, so you realize precisely where the errors are and what to repair.
WAVE is an excellent piece of software for troubleshooting your current websites for accessibility, determining exactly where the issues are, and assisting in their resolution!
Also read : 8 Recommended Free Seo Tools For You To Search For Keywords
2. Use an accessibility-ready WordPress theme.
What about starting off from scratch, however, with accessibility in mind from the very beginning? The best way to achieve this is to begin with accessibility-ready themes! WordPress itself has a tag for themes that are optimized for accessibility: Accessibility Ready, which you’ll browse here. Before any theme can have the “Accessibility Ready” tag, it must meet certain necessities, making certain it is truly accessibility ready.
Don’t overlook themes as you spherical up WordPress accessibility instruments.These requirements are inspired by WCAG and embody proper heading buildings, adequately contrasting color schemes, keyboard-navigable menus and navigation schemes, and more.
Although there are usually not as many accessibility-ready choices out there from WordPress directly as there are other themes, you can also filter by way of similar accessibility-ready themes on other online theme marketplaces, such as ThemeForest, and arrange a site optimized from the very start for accessibility!
3. Add useful options with WP Accessibility.
What if you have already got a site up and working and need to now take steps to optimize it for accessibility? WP Accessibility is the go-to plugin for exactly that; it’s a one-stop, multi-featured plugin with a plethora of tools to help make your website more accessible.
Here’s a WordPress accessibilitydevice that offers you a ton of options for improving a site. Here are a few of the options that WP Accessibility has:
1. Skiplinks: WP Accessibility allows you to add skiplinks to your pages, which allows customers who use screen readers or keyboards to navigate pages to simply skip between sections of the pages they want to see. These skiplinks may be set to always be seen or hidden unless the tab is pressed.
2. Empty Search Error: Some themes return every post/page for empty or clean searches, but this is ready to trigger an error and return nothing for an empty or clean search.
3. Link Underline: This forces links to be underlined in order to make them more visible.
4. Using the Keyboard to Outline Elements: When using the tab secret to navigate within a page, you can use this to place an overview of round links.
5. Accessibility Toolbar: This adds a toolbar to the left of the display screen that allows the consumer to regulate the textual content measurement and change to a high-contrast version of the site.
6. Remove title attributes: These are sometimes redundant and display screen readers read both them and the text in the case of images or links. Thus, WP Accessibility removes them to make it less cluttered.
WP Accessibility includes a number of different options and tools, and it could be a useful tool in making your website more accessible and user-friendly than before!
4. Change the text measurement using the Accessibility Widget.
Another superior and to-the-point plugin is Accessibility Widget, which permits you to add a widget in your sidebar, footer, or wherever you need to have widgets, that changes the textual content measurement on the press of a button.
As you evaluate WordPress accessibility tools, don’t overlook primary things like textual content dimension. Within it, you can probably define which HTML/CSS tags to resize and set the listing of sizes to select from as well. Once arranged, the widget appears with the predefined record of textual content sizes to choose from on the press of a button. All in all, the Accessibility Widget could be very straightforward to use, is user-friendly, and does the job extremely well!
5. Use ResponsiveVoice Text to Speech to transform a page into audio.
Another superior accessibility plugin is ResponsiveVoice Text to Speech, which, as you can in all probability guess from its name, creates an audio clip of the textual content on your web page or post. An extensively customizable plugin, ResponsiveVoice permits you to select between eighty different voices. It offers you the ability to pick which text to read out, add in an “end-of-page” message which is performed when the person reaches the top of the page, add in an exit intent message when a user scrolls away from the web page to the toolbar/address bar, converse out paragraphs utilizing CTRL-UP and CTRL-DOWN keys, and far more.
Converting text to audio is a robust function due to the WordPress accessibility software. ResponsiveVoice is also not restricted to widgets only, but you can use both shortcodes or HTML to have a button show on your site, which might be anyplace on any web page or post, above or between textual content, or within the sidebar or footer as a customized widget itself.
With this, your customers can now get an audio clip of the textual content simply by clicking a button, making your website more accessible for those who won’t be able to correctly read the content.
Closing thoughts on WordPress accessibility
These tools and plugins, while not an exhaustive list of all the available ones that can help with accessibility, can greatly assist you in either getting started with creating an accessible website or troubleshooting and optimizing your current sites for accessibility.
