This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest three major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

wA11y – The Web Accessibility Toolbox

Description

wA11y is a WordPress plugin that provides a toolbox of resources to help you improve the accessibility of your WordPress website.

If you would like to contribute to the plugin, or report issues, please go through the wA11y Github repo.

What Does “wA11y” Mean?

“A11y” is the commonly used abbreviation for accessibility, since there are eleven letters between the “a” and the “y”.

“w” + “A11y” is my abbreviation for “web accessibility”. #wa11y

What Is Web Accessibility?

Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites by people with disabilities.

Data shows 1 in 5 people have a disability. If your site is inaccessible, you could be excluding 20% of your potential users, customers, students, and more.

The foundation for good accessibility is great markup which also means that good accessibility can improve your SEO.

Accessibility Resources and Tools

The WPCampus community has a great list of accessibility resources and tools available on their website.

This resource is open-source and WPCampus would love for you to contribute. Visit the WPCampus Resources repo to learn how to contribute.

WA11Y PRO TIP: Take advantage of in-browser testing tools, like WAVE and HTML_CodeSniffer, to evaluate WordPress theme demos before you purchase.

Tools Included In wA11y

The mission for the wA11y plugin is to provide a plethora of tools to help you evaluate and improve the accessibility of your website.

If you would like to see any new tools added to the plugin, please create an issue in the wA11y Github repo and label it an “enhancement”.

Tota11y

tota11y is an accessibility visualization toolkit provided by your friends at Khan Academy. It is a single JavaScript file that inserts a small button in the bottom corner of your document and helps visualize how your site performs with assistive technologies.

WAVE

WAVE is a free evaluation tool provided by WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind). It can be used to evaluate a live website for a wide range of accessibility issues.

Filters

Filters provide a way for you to modify a piece of data inside the wA11y plugin. Learn more about filters.

Here is a list of the filters available for this plugin:

  • ‘wa11y_settings’
    • Allows you to change the plugin settings
    • Passes 1 argument: the default settings
  • ‘wa11y_wave_url’
    • Allows you to change the URL passed to WAVE
    • Passes 2 arguments: the default URL and the post object (if defined)
  • ‘wa11y_load_tota11y’
    • Allows you to pass a boolean to define whether or not the tota11y tool should be loaded
    • Passes 2 arguments: the default setting and the plugin’s settings
  • ‘wa11y_load_wave’
    • Allows you to pass a boolean to define whether or not the WAVE tool should be loaded
    • Passes 2 arguments: the default setting and the plugin’s settings

Installation

  1. Upload ‘wa11y’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  3. Go to Settings > wA11y to setup the plugin.

Reviews

19 January 2019
As a developer, having this resource to be able to test my plugin directly within the WordPress dashboard and front end is HUGE. Accessibility matters. Since it does, having this tool in your toolbelt as a developer or even someone vetting plugins for users is phenomenal. With this plugin, you no longer have an excuse for putting out inaccessible websites.
22 May 2017
This plugin goes on all of my development sites. It makes checking the site for accessibility so much easier than using external resources. Love it. Thank you, Rachel!!!
22 January 2017
This plugin is now part of my starters WP install, I use it just after installing a theme, in order to fix any accessibility issues right from the start.
3 September 2016
A Plugin Of Great Industry! This plugin teaches you how you can make better sites/plugins/themes/WordPresses Turn this on when your working on developing WordPress sites, plugins or themes or WordPress itself. #realtalk we've all written plenty of code that is not as accessible as it should be. Let's not make these problems worse by ensuring that everything we do write, moving forward is going to be accessible. 5 Stars
3 September 2016
Hi Rachel This is a awesome tool, this will make it much easier to get accessibility right. Much appreciated, thank you very much.
3 September 2016
Thanks for a wonderful plugin. So far I have played with most of the features and I am really impressed. The fact that I can now check accessibility from a local server is fantastic. Thanks so much.
Read all 6 reviews

Contributors and Developers

“wA11y – The Web Accessibility Toolbox” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“wA11y – The Web Accessibility Toolbox” has been translated into 3 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “wA11y – The Web Accessibility Toolbox” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Change Log

1.0.3

  • Updating totally to v0.2.0.

1.0.2

  • Fixed PHP bug on settings page.

1.0.1

  • Added accessibility resources information to settings page.
  • NOTICE: I removed the plugin’s PHP constants.

1.0.0

Plugin launch