Is your site accessible? If you’re on WordPress, making your site accessible to users is as easy as using a WordPress accessibility plug-in.
In this post, we’ll walk you through WordPress accessibility plug-ins, why you need them, and what are the best WordPress accessibility plug-ins available in the market.
WordPress Accessibility Plug-in Defined
A WordPress accessibility plug-in is a plug-in that you can install on your site to make it highly accessible to people with disabilities. Generally, these plug-ins offer various functions. But at the very core, it makes it easy for your site to navigate, perceive and understand.
According to Sytian Productions, a website developer philippines company who has years of experience in making WordPress websites – “Accessibility is important not only for the sake of usability and conversion, but the law dictates that websites should be built with accessibility in mind. Learn more about the website accessibility law on this site.
What Are the Benefits of Using Accessibility Plug-ins?
It’s possible that you can enhance your site accessibility by using accessibility reader themes or schemes if you know some kind of CSS and HTML.
However, if you’re not tech-ready, high-quality accessibility plug-ins are a much better option for your and your site. Doing so makes your site accessible without making changes in the site design or performance without you touching the code.
These tools also provide readability options such as link underlining, customizing the font size, different site contrast settings, gray scaling, etc.
It also provides you access to several options, like putting accessible links to sitemaps, content highlighting, and reading adjustments. Having these features on your site can potentially avoid legal trouble.
Best WordPress Accessibility Plug-ins
Here’s a list of the best WordPress accessibility plug-ins:
WP Accessibility
WP Accessibility makes it easy for you to make simple changes to enhance WordPress accessibility. Plenty of plug-ins will highlight what’s wrong rather than fix it, but this plug-in does the exact opposite.
When you access the plug-in’s settings, you’ll encounter a series of checkboxes that you can easily configure. All you need to do is tick off the box of a particular feature or action that you want the plug-in to take, and it does.
It also places noticeable elements on particular website elements. It allows users to find what’s essential on the page. It’s a relatively simple plug-in, and it covers pretty fundamental changes.
One-Click Accessibility
This plug-in claims that it’s the fastest plug-in out there that make your WordPress site more accessible to users. Like WP Accessibility, these plug-ins require a very minimal set-up, and you don’t need to have coding knowledge.
One of the main features is the Accessibility Toolbar which lets you set things like:
- Resizing fonts
- Grayscale
- Links Underline
- Light Background
- High Contrast
- Link to Feedback, Sitemap, and Help pages
Other features also allow you to skip content, remove target attributes from links, and add landmark roles to links. It also has a customizer that allows style adjustments.
WP ADA Compliance Check Basic
While other plug-ins modify our site to fulfill particular accessibility criteria, this plug-in doesn’t change your site. What it does is it will scan your site for any accessibility problems and come up with reports along with instructions on how you can address these issues.
This plug-in also lets you evaluate your published content. Thus, you can scan the whole site immediately. If you opt for the free version, you’ll be limited to 25 posts or pages, and the plug-in won’t scan theme files. On the other hand, the paid version will remove these limits. It also makes automatic changes to your site.
Accessibility by UserWay
This premium plug-in is for you if you want a full accessibility plug-in powered by AI. Accessibility by UserWay uses artificial intelligence or AI to scan your website and offer advice.
Furthermore, the entire process will be streamlined because of AI, making it easy for all businesses. Its main features include color contrast correction, an enlarged cursor screen reader, Alt text generation, and more.
It also prevents you from using colors that are difficult to read by users with visual impairments such as color blindness. Overall, it’s an excellent plug-in that covers just about anything at a cost-effective price.
WP Accessibility Helper
This plug-in allows you to toggle accessibility features straight from your dashboard. Using this plug-in, you can easily resize your fonts, underline and highlight links, remote animations, or switch to a scheme with enough contrast.
WP Accessibility Helper is a freemium plug-in, unlike the previous plug-ins we’ve mentioned. The premium version starts at $99 for a single website.
Web Accessibility by accessiBe
This is one of the best WordPress plug-ins in the market, especially if you’re a business owner and want to optimize your site’s accessibility. Thus AI-powered SaaS plug-in allows small business sites to be both ADA and WCAG2.1 compliant.
It also comes with a wide range of features that let you reach industry standards in terms of accessibility. For instance, the plug-in’s built-in AI automatically enables you to label your content using icons and tags. In the same way, it helps visitors who are visually impaired to identify everything on the screen with relative ease.
WP Accessibility Tools and Missing Alt Text Finder
This is another simple yet effective plug-in that makes your site highly accessible to users who have impairments.
One of its main features is a missing alt text finder. It will evaluate your media library, posts, and pages for images with no alt text. Then, it allows you to add it with just a click easily.
Similarly, you can place a description text or a caption text using this tool. It also comes with a contrast ratio checker that allows you to meet the requirements of the ADA in terms of color contrast for your pages. Meanwhile, for accessibility, it has an interactive checklist listing WCAG requirements.
Over to You
When it comes to your site, you must ensure that everyone has a great experience. Otherwise, they’ll hesitate to come. All these plug-ins we’ve listed are well known for their quality, giving you outstanding accessibility standards for your site.
Photo by Justin Morgan on Unsplash