9 WordPress Accessibility Plugins That You Should Consider in 2024

While creating a website, you consider many aspects but one thing you often miss out on is the possibility of people with disabilities chancing upon your site. If you want to cater to everyone, you must consider their concerns and develop a website with accessibility features. With WordPress Accessibility plugins, you can now easily make your website accessible to all, including people with disabilities. In this article, we will be discussing the top 9 accessibility plugins that you should consider for your website. 

Why Accessibility Plugin?

Nearly 1 in 5 people in the US have some form of disability. People with disabilities access websites differently. They sometimes need sufficient colour contrast and other tools to navigate a site. Recent WordPress default themes do consider accessibility, but that is not just enough to cater to people with disabilities. Be it a blog or an e-commerce store, what you require is a maximum number of people visiting your site. For this, you need to consider people with disabilities as well and make your website accessible to them. The accessibility plugins have met the challenges of accessibility and ensure that navigation through sites is made easy for everyone. 

However, accessibility plugins are only quick fixes for accessibility challenges and may not be foolproof. You can use them for accessibility, but the only fix to this should start from the design itself. For now, you can try out these plugins which may fix your problem. To learn more about web accessibility, you could check this out. 

Now, let’s see which are the best WordPress Accessibility Plugins that make your job easy. 

WP Accessibility

WP Accessibility by Joe Dolson is undoubtedly one of the best WordPress accessibility plugins available for WordPress. This plugin helps rectify the accessibility challenges of WordPress themes. It requires little expertise to set up and run the plugin and can easily be disabled in the settings menu. One of the major features of this plugin is the skip links option. This feature allows the user to skip irrelevant content on your web page and access only what is required. 

Other features of WP Accessibility include:

• Adding language and text direction attributes to your HTML attribute if missing.
• Identifying images without alt attributes in the Media Library
• Adding labels to standard WordPress form fields (search, comments)
• Adding post titles to “read more” links.
• Removing tab index from focusable elements.
• Forcing a search page error when a search is made with an empty text string. 

Also read: Best WordPress Migration Plugins to Move Your Site

WP Accessibility Helper (WAH)

WP Accessibility Helper (WAH) is another WordPress accessibility plugin that helps to remove barriers to accessibility for people with disabilities. This plugin helps solve accessibility issues such as font size, contrast, titles and aria-label tags, images alt and much more. Skip links menu, font resize and resetting font size button are some of the features of the plugin. 

Other features include: 

• DOM Scanner – check pages and post for accessibility errors, like image alt, links role and titles, and much more.
• Custom colours for contrast mode
• Unload all CSS files (display page in raw HTML)
• Underline all links
• Highlight all links
• Attachments control centre with the ability add/edit images titles and alt tags 
• Remove title attributes from links
• Greyscale images controls
• Dark & Light Themes controls
• Invert colours & images mode

One-Click Accessibility

One-Click Accessibility is a fast WordPress accessibility plugin to deal with accessibility issues. The plugin adds many accessibility features to your website with a minimum amount of set-up and need of no experience. The plugin is free and is easy to control. One-Click Accessibility helps you add a toolbar toggling hat that allows you to set the font to resize, grayscale, negative contrast, high contrast, light background, links underline, readable font and link to sitemap/feedback/help pages.

Other Features: 

• Enable skip to content
• Add outline focus for focusable elements
• Remove the target attribute from links
• Add landmark roles to all links
• Customizer for style adjustment

Accessibility by UserWay

Another AI-powered accessibility plugin, Accessibility by UserWay is one of the most efficient WordPress Accessibility Plugins available. Anyone with reading disabilities can easily navigate through a website with the installation of this plugin, making navigation easier. The customization tools of this plugin include a Screen reader, Enlarged cursor, Highlighted links, Dyslexia-friendly font and many more. With this plugin, you can have web barrier-free and accessible to all. 

Features:

• Automatically generated alt text
• Colour contrast correction
• Page structure and organization resolutions
• Undefined and broken link remediation

Also read: Best Multi-Currency Plugins for WooCommerce

WP ADA Compliance Check Basic

One of the most advanced WordPress Accessibility Plugins available, WP ADA Compliance Check Basic is trusted to protect thousands of small business, Government and educational institutions websites. This easy to use WordPress Accessibility plugin evaluates your website for Web Accessibility issues when content is published or you can run a complete scan of your website to identify issues in all of your content. The plugin is compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder and ClassicPress. 

Features: 

• Evaluates websites against WCAG 2.1 Level A, AA and Section 508 standards.
• Scans the entire website: themes, widgets, shortcodes, custom fields, terms, menus, excerpts, archives, iframes, PDF files, CSS files and even linked pages.
• Many issues are corrected automatically, saving you time and money.
• Full website scans, scheduled, on-demand and single page scans from the content editor or all pages list are included.
• Includes an issue summary and easy to read reports. 
• Includes a web accessibility widget to enhance the accessibility of the website.
• Includes many WordPress improvements and time-saving features.
• Includes an option to white label the plugin.

The Accessibility Toolbar

The Accessibility Toolbar by Online ADA boosts the accessibility of your website substantially. Site visitors can change the font, enlarge text size, and find the best colour contrast to consuming the content on your website in the best possible way. The toolbar is completely mobile responsive and provides a seamless experience for users across desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Features:

• Cloud-based service
• Completely mobile responsive
• Site-Wide screen reader enhancements
• Easy to use text-to-speech options.
• Create a tab-navigable accessibility menu so all users can quickly find the content they’re looking for.
• Users can create an account that will save their preferred settings so they don’t need to readjust them when they return to your site.

Also read: Best Social Proof WordPress Plugins to Improve Sales in Your Website

WP Accessibility Tools & Missing Alt Text Finder

For people with disabilities, WP Accessibility Tools & Missing Alt Text Finder is an excellent tool to navigate through websites. The main feature of this WordPress accessibility plugin is a missing alt text finder which adds alt text, description text or caption text to pictures in your media library, pages and posts. 

Other features include:

• Helps the process of making your website ADA Section 508 Compliant become much easier. (by adding Alt Text to all pictures on your website)
• Allows you to run an Automated A11Y Accessibility Audit so you can see where you are not compliant.
• Provides a free Contrast Ratio Checker. This allows you to easily understand your websites contrast ratios.
• Provides an interactive (WCAG 2.1) Section 508 Checklist. This checklist helps you better understand the WCAG 2.1 recommendations and guidelines.
• Offers a ton of Free Accessibility resources in the form of links that will greatly help your understanding of web accessibility.

Play.ht

Play.ht is an excellent plugin to convert all written text to audio content. With this WordPress accessibility plugin, you can easily convert your blog posts, articles and courses into audio format. Play.ht uses state of the art Text to Speech technology and SEO friendly embedded audio players along with RSS podcast feeds to help you create, embed and distribute your articles in audio format.

Features:

• Increases accessibility and user engagement of your content using 260+ high-quality Text to Speech AI voices.
• Increases the time users spend on your website thereby increasing Time on Page metrics and reducing Bounce rates.
• Provides easy shareability of your articles as audio on Twitter & Facebook.
• Enables you to publish your articles and blog posts as Podcasts on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.
• Get detailed audio analytics of your audio.
• A state of the art Text to Voice editor to help with editing audio of your articles.

Also read: Best Testimonial Plugins for WordPress

Zeno Font Resizer

This WordPress accessibility plugin is specifically designed for people with reading disabilities. The plugin gives the visitors of your website an option to change the font size of the site content according to their preferences. It is easy to install and use and caters well to people with disabilities. 

Features: 

• Uses JavaScript and jQuery to set the font size.
• Settings are saved in a cookie, so the visitor sees the same font size on a revisit.
• Admin page to set which content is being resized, the resize steps and other options.
• You can use the standard widget or you can use code to add to your theme.
• Simple and lightweight.

Wrapping Up

Honestly, accessibility shouldn’t be an option but in-built as people with disabilities should be able to navigate websites without any discomfort. However, as long as getting it to default isn’t available, you can choose any of the WordPress accessibility plugins mentioned above and make life easier for people who are impaired.