From the course: WordPress: Accessibility

Understanding accessibility in WordPress - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress: Accessibility

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Understanding accessibility in WordPress

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- [Instructor] Although WordPress offers a lot in the way of accessibility, you cannot simply install WordPress, set up a site with any theme, and expect it to be accessible. This is because WordPress isn't a monolithic system. Any website built with WordPress is a collection of many different pieces assembled together. The core of WordPress generates part of the site, but much more of your website will come from your theme, your plugins, and your own choices when adding content. Let's use the analogy that a WordPress website is like a house. In this house, WordPress has set up the framing and the foundation. You've got the bones of a home, but with WordPress alone, you don't have a house, at least not one that is at all usable. When you add a classic theme, it will set up siding and roofing materials, it'll create doors, points where you can access your house, it'll add windows and that all the ornamental elements that make your house look great from the street. Your content is like what you put in each room, making sure that each room in your house serves a well-defined purpose and has all the pieces of furniture you need to communicate. Plugins are the plumbing and mechanicals of your house, they're the pieces of a website that help with the necessary foundations for your website. Plugins are what transform your house between a home, a home business, a retail store, or an apartment building. With the right choice of plugins, the purpose of your new building takes shape. Within this analogy, we can start to illustrate how accessibility can go wrong in WordPress. No matter how solid the underlying framing and foundation may be, your theme, plugins, and content can cover up that foundation and create new problems. The theme explicitly provides a set of colors and fonts, these fonts may be difficult to read, the colors chosen might create contrast problems to people who are colorblind have difficulty seeing. While WordPress includes accessible search and comments forms, these can be replaced by the theme, so they may not be correctly labeled and they maybe can't be identified using a screen reader. The HTML of the navigation menu comes from WordPress, but once it's styled by the theme using CSS and JavaScript, it may no longer be navigable using the keyboard. Plugins can add a whole new interaction experience to your website and WordPress has no control over what that experience might be like. When you install a plugin, you're either changing part of how WordPress normally creates output or you're adding something totally new. Whatever that plugin does and whatever claims it makes, you are responsible for checking. Your content is a mixture of output from WordPress, from plugins, and your own creative decisions. As we'll find in this course, the output created in WordPress, while fully capable of being accessible, needs to be considered with care. A WordPress website can absolutely be accessible, but you'll need to become familiar with finding accessible resources, investigating the accessibility of your site, and learning the best and the worst of what WordPress has to offer. What about Full Site Editing? This is something that's rapidly changing with the addition of Full Site Editing in WordPress. If you're using a block theme, this analogy doesn't work quite the same way. I'll examine Full Site Editing in greater detail later in the course. For now, know that with Full Site Editing, WordPress is taking a much greater role in generating the underlying framework of your site.

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