Beware: WordPress Accessibility Plugins Can Make Your Site LESS Accessible

updated on May 3, 2024

If you’re considering using an accessibility plugin for your WordPress website, it’s probably because you’re recently realized just how important it is for people of all ability levels to be able to use your site with ease.

But perhaps it has also started to dawn on you just how much time it can actually take to make a website accessible to people with visual or other disabilities — especially if you’ve already spent months or years adding content to your site in inaccessible ways.

Accessibility plugins have a variety of features that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve a site’s accessibility. These tools seem to present a wonderful shortcut through hours of sifting through every image and page on your site to fix mistakes and add missing data.

However, if you don’t do some research before installing one of these accessibility plugins, you may eventually find that the plugin is doing more harm than good in your accessibility efforts, especially in the long-term.

Here’s more about how these plugins work and how to choose one that will actually meet your accessibility goals.

How Accessibility Plugins Work

In general, installing an accessibility plugin is as simple as downloading and uploading a plugin in your WordPress plugins area, or perhaps inserting a line of code in a designated area of your site after you sign up for an account.

Once the tool is up and running, some features are available to website visitors immediately. Others may appear after a few hours, or however long it takes the technology to crawl through your existing website content.

Here are just a few of the features that accessibility plugins may offer to help disabled people access your site content:

Artificial intelligence can compose alternative text for the photos on the site (for more on what alternative text is and how to write it, check out our full post on composing alternative text)
Screen readers may be available to read content out loud for those who can’t see the screen
Color and contrast adjustment features can accommodate colorblind people or otherwise visually impaired people
“Blink blockers” can protect people with epilepsy from triggering or irritating flashes
Navigation features allow users to navigate the site using voice commands or using the keyboard only (no mouse)
Users may be able to adjust the overall text size, use a magnifier to enlarge certain text, change the font, or turn on a highlighter to make things like hyperlinks easier to identify

Not all accessibility tools have all of these features, but they generally have some combination.

Common Problems with Accessibility Plugins

At first, all of these features seem super helpful. After all, it’s important for people to be able to read and navigate your site regardless of visual and physical abilities. However, once you start to dig deeper into how some of these plugins work, it doesn’t take long to notice problems.

Here are the biggest issues our clients have reported as they try to use sites that employ accessibility plugins.

All artificially generated text still requires manual double checking. AI has come a long way in recent years, and machines can recognize the objects in images and describe them more and more accurately. However, when we’ve tried to use these AI text tools ourselves, we’ve seen firsthand its limits in describing images. Failing to double-check the captions or text that were written by an algorithm guarantees that some text will be inaccurate, which causes awkwardness and confusion for website visitors.
Many of the features that accessibility plugins offer conflict with tools that disabled people are already using to navigate the internet. People with disabilities who need accomodations typically already have their tools installed on their machine to help them navigate websites. It’s usually more effective for them to use the tools that they’re used to using, which are specialized for their needs and provide a more consistent experience across websites. For example, in most cases, blind people already use screen readers, and other visually impaired people have their own text magnifiers and browser settings to adjust text size. These tools make accessibility features redundant at best, and at worst the programs can conflict with one another. Some users must disable so-called accessibility plugins so they can access the site with their own tools.

Blind man using a braille screen reader.

Customizations from accessibility plugins may hurt your brand. Consistency is key when it comes to branding. Some accessibility plugins allow website visitors to adjust the colors and even the fonts on each page, which means that people will be experiencing your site in many different ways. Plus, leaving it up to the visitor to adjust your site once they arrive is certainly less user-friendly than just building a site that works for everyone who lands on it right away. For example, a person with epilepsy shouldn’t have to turn off a blinking feature on your site, because a good developer should have known not to include those features from the beginning.
The fixes stop working if you miss a payment. Because accessibility plugins don’t actually make changes to your site (instead, they just add an overlay with features on top of the existing site), all of the accessibility features they provide will be gone as soon as you stop paying for the plugin. Some of the companies that offer these tools offer more personalized services in addition to the technology, such as manual audits, consulting, and training, for permanent accessibility changes. But you can expect to spend a lot more money and time making the substantial changes that actually last.
These plugins may put you out of compliance with data privacy law. Overlay plugins often automatically detect what other assistive software the user is already running on the device, or ask the user to choose what assistance they need. This reveals that the person visiting the website has a disability. Just like other identifiable information like age or ethnic background, information about disabilities should not be collected without user consent. This would be a violation of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the UK GDPR, CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and other privacy laws. Some overlays save this information regarding disability via a cookie on the website to use it on other sites running their plugin – so even if the user opted in legally on another site, the overlay may put your site out of compliance by having that persistent cookie. Read more about privacy and overlay plugins in this post.

Essentially, what automated accessibility tools do is try to paint over the accessibility problems of a website. The result is usually a website that appears to be accessible — one that may impress nondisabled people who see that the company is making an effort to be inclusive — but just makes disabled peoples’ lives more difficult.

Overlay Plugins May Attract Lawsuits

Predatory lawsuit attorneys know that overlay accessibility plugins can’t fix all accessibility issues. This makes sites running those plugins easy targets because it’s easy to prove that the site owner knew that they should fix accessibility barriers, but they didn’t fix all the barriers.

There is increasing anecdotal evidence that sites using accessibility plugins are being targeted for lawsuits. In 2023, 25% of all lawsuits that made it to court were using an accessibility widget. This number represents an 80% increase from the year before. So while some site owners believe that an overlay will protect them from a lawsuit, it’s actually quite the opposite!

One Recommended Plugin

Most of the WordPress accessibility plugins we’ve been talking about in this post are “overlay” plugins. You can read more about overlay plugins here. But there are a few plugins that offer tools for users to improve accesibility.

One of those tools we especially recommend is Accessibility Checker by Equalize Digital. Here’s a video that introduces the plugin and how to use it:

[Presenter – Amber Hinds]

Hi, my name is Amber Hinds. I’m the CEO of Equalize Digital. And I’m going to walk you through some of the features for our Accessibility Checker plugin for WordPress.

Alright, so we are here in the WordPress admin. I have a page that has been built out in the block editor, and if I scroll down below the content, I can see an Accessibility Checker report. I can see right here that this has 81% passed tests for the tests that we’ve checked. There are 12 errors, 10 contrast errors, 9 warnings, and nothing has been ignored or dismissed.

If I click over on the Details tab, I can then get a look at:

10 insufficient color contrast
7 improper use of link
2 image missing alternative text
2 ambiguous anchor text
1 incorrect heading order
6 things with ARIA hidden
2 images alternative with empty alternative text
1 low quality alternative text on this page.

Now if I’m a content editor, I can expand these and go through them. I can maybe start at the bottom with this warning of one. And I can see that there’s an image, it shows the affected code, it actually shows me a little thumbnail of the image, and then I could choose to go work on that image. So, for example, this is flagging because the alt is “image of student”.

But I’m not sure what low-quality alternative text means. I could click on the “I” icon that is next to that title, and that would link over to documentation on the Equalize website. If I know where this image is, I could scroll up on the page and find it. Oh, I scroll up, and here’s my gallery. And if I click on the image, indeed, I could see that.

So I could say, Okay, let’s give a better alternative text for this. I’ve typed out “young female Asian student working on laptop in class.” Because this is a much more descriptive alternative text that describes the image. Rather than just saying image of students, we’re on a college website, almost every image is an image of students.

So I’ve entered that in. I could then move on to my next one. And I can see, oh, look, both of these images are actually missing. They have image empty alternative text, I could move through those and go find those images, and then correct them. Let’s see, this is a picture of Fort Collins, Colorado. So I’m just gonna say “Fort Collins, Colorado, from the sky.” Maybe there’d be a better “drone photo” or something.

But anyways, you can see what I do. I can work through all of these issues. If I hit update, then you’ll notice that it will rescan my page. All the scans run on the server. So there are no API calls, no fee, or API cost every time you are running a scan.

So once it rescans, then you’ll see this section reloads. And now I can see that “low quality image alternative text” went away. I also now only have one image with empty because I’ve fixed those two. And I could go through and I could fix all of these.

But let’s say I get to something like there are 6 ARIA hidden, and I expand this. And I can see social media links. They have little icons for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn. And these are all hidden. This is a warning. This particular warning means, hey, this is hidden from screen readers, is this correct or not?

And if I scroll up in my page, boy, I don’t see those. So what I’m going to do is I can use this view on page link. If I click view on page, it will load the front end of the website, and it will jump me down to that section. It’ll find it on the page, and it highlights it.

So now I can see oh, this is where the icon is. It’s in my footer. It’s not actually on my page. So if my footer was built with widgets, or something else, I could go to that section to fix it. But I’m actually going to just take a look at the code right here. And I’m inspecting this element.

What I want to know is this SVG, the icon is hidden, but is there any text that explains to someone that this link goes to LinkedIn? And indeed I see that there’s text here that goes from LinkedIn. So it’s actually correct for this to be hidden.

Now, this is an example when I might use the “Ignore” feature. I can ignore right here on this page. I can click ignore, and I can say “screen reader text is present” as my comment. I can also ignore without a comment. But a comment helps other people know. I can see, okay, I was the one who ignored it. And this would make it in my summary, it would remove that warning. And it would show that there’s one ignored item.

But boy, I know from looking on the front of the website that this is on every page. Well, in Accessibility Checker Pro, we have an “Open Issues” view. If you go to open issues, you can see all of the issues across your entire site. This particular site doesn’t have a lot. It’s a faked site. But I’ll give you a peek in just a second, and what this would look like on a site that has a lot of content. And not just two pages, this only has two pages, but we also have the “Fast Track” View.

So I could go to Fast Track. And I could find, let’s see where we have the ARIA hidden. So these are one of those SVGs, if I review, it’s ARIA hidden. I think, compare, we’re working on, we’re gonna get an image of these here soon. And I could actually hit a global ignore. And what that would do is that would say, I know that this SVG is correctly hidden, so I’m going to ignore it on all of the pages of my entire site.

So once I do that, then if I were to go back here and I were to refresh, we should see that we have two ignored items. So now we have two ignored items. And I don’t have to do it on every individual page. I can actually do it on a global site-wide basis.

So if you’re installing this on a website for the first time, we always recommend coming to the Open Issues tab. I’ll show you a peek. Now this is an old copy of one of our websites that we had built for ourselves long before we knew about accessibility. We installed this plugin, and you can see we’re getting 7,395 links that open in a new window or tab warnings. There are 677 instances of incorrect headings. So there’s kind of a larger number. And this might give you a feel for what it’s like on a larger website. And however many things might have issues, we always recommend if you have Accessibility Checker Pro to come here.

You can really dive into issues better and get a feel for where to find them. So for example, if I were to just go into, let’s look at, let’s say I wanted to find all of the links with ambiguous text. By clicking on this, I can see there are 39 of them.

So once, what this does is it takes me to a report that shows the detail view just for those 39. I can see there are 39 ambiguous anchor text errors. There’s an explanation that explains what it is. And it says how to fix it, “To resolve this error change the link text to be less generic so that it has meaning if heard on its own.” There’s a link to more detailed documentation.

And then I can scroll down and I can see exactly where this exists. So on post title, “CSU lecture WordPress development in 43 minutes,” I can see that it’s a post, this is the issue. This is the specific link and I can see it’s the word “here” that has been linked. So I could, again, I could view it and that would take me to the front end and it would highlight it. I could edit it, which would take me to the edit page. So I can then edit or I can click ignore. If I wanted to ignore just for this one instance. But again, of course, I could go to the fast track and I could add a global ignore there.

Another feature that we recently added is the ability to go through a website completely on the front end. So you’ll notice when you’re logged in, if you have Accessibility Checker either the free or the pro version installed, there is a button. For a screen reader user, it’s pretty high up in the DOM, but it is, for a sighted person, in the bottom right-hand corner.

If I click this, this will open our Accessibility Checker report. And it will show the issues that exist on the page and we can actually toggle through them on a specific page. So I can jump right through every issue that exists. Here’s an image with our alternative text. Here is an icon up in the header where it is a link, even though it’s functioning as a button. Here’s something that has an incorrect heading level, it’s not following the correct heading structure of the page, and so on. And so we can move through in this visual way and start to see the issues that exist on the page.

I hope you found this quick walkthrough helpful. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. If you’re using the free version of the plugin, you can contact us on the wordpress.org support forum. Or if you have a paid version of the plugin, you get personalized email support, and you can contact us via your plugin dashboard.

Thanks so much and happy accessibility testing.

[End of transcript]

A Better Accessibility Strategy

The best solution is not ultimately a plugin, but to actually fix the underlying accessibility issues with your site manually instead of just masking them. If you’re at the beginning stages of site creation, this can be as easy as hiring a developer who is familiar with accessibility issues.

If your site is already well established, then you might have a bit more work. However, we still think it’s a better solution to understand what’s required to make lasting changes to the foundation of your site, even if you can’t afford to make the changes all at once.

Being able to demonstrate a commitment to a plan to continue making your site accessible, even if you are making gradual progress may be a better position if you do get sued than using an overlay plugin.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have questions or would like to chat about your site’s accessibility.

Our Accessibility Maintenance Plans help you remove barriers for people with disabilities and meet legal requirements with confidence.

Learn More about Plans

Beware: WordPress Accessibility Plugins Can Make Your Site LESS Accessible

How Accessibility Plugins Work

Common Problems with Accessibility Plugins

Overlay Plugins May Attract Lawsuits

One Recommended Plugin

A Better Accessibility Strategy

About the Author

Bet Hannon

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