4 ways to make your WordPress Site more accessible

Search engine optimization and WordPress accessibility go hand in hand. If you have structured your page properly, then you can be assured that the page is machine friendly. You need to employ techniques that bring in meaningful content, make your site more accessible and search engine friendly. Just follow these 4 ways to make your WordPress site more accessible.

Get the images labeled with Alt Text

Most of the accessibility complaints are related to labeling the images. If only the websites built use the alt Text labels to the images, the issue is solved. An alt tag is mandatory for the meaning images on the site. If there is a slow loading issue with the browser, the users can see what the image intends to convey if only there is an alt tag message. If you are using images for decorative purpose, you can either place them as CSS background images and the screen reader ignores it or you can choose the alt tag and leave it empty for the HTML5 images. Ensure that you place alt tags only for the meaningful images like the ones that are used as buttons or links or controls.

Use of Plugins

Various plugins enhance the accessibility of WordPress. A few useful plugins are Access Keys, Easy Retweet, A Sticky PostOrderEr, Hackadelic SEO table of contents, and WP Polls. You can use Access Keys to assign links and controls in your site. You can make easy the sharing of content on Twitter using Easy Retweet. You can decide the order in which your content is placed using PostOrderEr. WP polls lets the users with physical disabilities to take part in any of the polls.

Proper Use of Headings

When you place the headings correctly in the order that is easy to access, then obviously the users find easy to navigate using H and Shift + H. Use h1 as the heading to the site title, h2 to the second heading and so on.

Use of Navigation Links

Your site design should necessarily contain navigation links. These links let the people with disabilities to skip the navigation bar, menu bar and check boxes and move to a certain place in the web page. A few examples are

• Skip to main content
• Jump to search
• Jump to navigation bar

A few WordPress themes offer these links as default. You can just check and see if you can add any more to the available list. If the themes do not provide navigation links, you need to add these links yourself.

You can never rely on these techniques to make your WordPress site 100% accessible. However, they make the site more than 90% accessible. These techniques address the issue of what 90% of people complain of inaccessibility of the website.