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Testing your website for accessibility is important to ensure that people with disabilities can use it. Accessibility in computing refers to the accessibility of a person with disabilities to computers and computer software. The goal of accessible design is to enable people who have temporary or permanent disabilities that prevent them from using standard input devices or browsers to obtain the same information and functionality provided to non-disabled users. Plugins like accessiBe WordPress can help with this, and other tools exist.
This article will examine how you can test your WordPress site for accessibility.
Table of Contents
Step 1 – Check Your Coding
The first step is to check your coding. Do this by opening any standard page of your site in the browser where you see the HTML source code. This will allow you to view and analyze your web pages as they are displayed in a browser with pre-recorded video, thus showing the user who wants to access it with assistive technology. There are a number of tools that can help you do this, for example:
– The W3C Markup Validation Service: This tool validates HTML and XHTML markup against the published recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
– Download Mozilla Firefox Web Developer: A tool used to inspect, edit and debug web pages in real-time.
– The W3C HTML validator: This tool checks pages for compliance with the HTML standard (4.01 or 5.0) and ensures that browsers render them properly, but it does not test for other technologies like CSS or JavaScript.
After you’ve analyzed your site’s coding, fix any errors you encounter.
Step 2 – Check Your Images
The second step is to check for images on your site. Do this by opening any standard page of your site in the browser where you see the HTML source code, but disable images on your web browser so that they do not get downloaded and displayed. Then click on each image to verify that it has an alternative text description that accurately describes the image.
If you have problems in this area, try one of these tools:
– W3C Markup Validation Service: This tool verifies that the document has a valid W3C-style HTML or XHTML Document Type Definition (DTD).
– Hack Harpoon Web Accessibility Scanner: This is an automated scanner for CSS and JavaScript testing; it can be used within any browser to check your page against common accessibility errors. The tool provides a list of errors in an easy-to-read report.
– Some of the most popular WordPress plugins are also able to check your images for accessibility issues, including:
- All In One SEO Pack
- Google Analytics by Yoast
- AccessiBe WordPress
Step 3 – Check Your Alternative Text Descriptions
The third step is to go through any pages of your site and add alternate text descriptions to all the images, where necessary. A search engine can still read an alt attribute even if it has been removed in the HTML code.
Step 4 – Check Your Headings
The fourth step is to check your headings, especially for structure and better SEO. Do this by opening any web page in the browser where you see the HTML source code and checking that your web page has a heading structure using HTML headings (<H1>, <h2>, etc.) to organize your content. If you have any problems, try one of these tools:
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