At WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They’re one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe Torino ’24, Joe Dolson asked Rian Rietveld to review the documentation about accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) on the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ website. What she found was that the information was hard to find, scattered all around the place, with duplicated and incomplete information.
At WordCamp Basel ’25, we worked out a plan to improve the documentation for WordPress’ accessibility.
Last year we centralized, reviewed and updated this documentation, creating one source of truth: The WP Accessibility Knowledge Base on wpaccessibility.org.
The goal is for WordPress community to have consistant, easy to find, reliable, and up-to-date information about what is important to create sites, blocks, themes, admin functions, or plugins everyone can use.
Thank you Kinsta, Human Made, GoDaddy and Aiwos for sponsoring Joe and Rian to work on this documentation.
Last year: Reorganize, review, update and extend
Accessibility team Handbook
The Accessibility Team Handbook on WordPress.org now only contains information about the accessibility team, the WordPress accessibility coding standard and about how to contribute.
The advantage of updating everything is that you get new insights. Instead of 7 working groups, the team now has 3 focus groups: The accessibility of WordPress, The accessibility-ready program and Documentation and education. With each group its own contact person.
Theme accessibility-ready guidelines
Amber Hinds and Joe Dolson updated the theme accessibility-ready guidelines. These new requirements aare now published in the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base.
WP Accessibility Knowledge Base
All information about accessibility itself, originally in the handbook, has been moved to the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base on wpaccessibility.org. The content is written in markdown and lives on the GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/ pages of the repository wp-a11y-docs, owned by the accessibility team. Many people helped getting this documentation out there, thank you!
The WP Accessibility Knowledge Base now contains info about:
- Start with accessibility, with an introduction to WCAGWCAG WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are helping make sure the internet is accessible to all people no matter how they would need to access the internet (screen-reader, keyboard only, etc) https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/., 7 quick wins, the business case, how to get training and eduction and also our opinion about overlays.
- Accessibility-ready program, with the theme requirements, testing process and how to find accessibility-ready themes.
- Standards and best practice, for content & images, design & user experience, frontend code, web forms, legislation and how to document accessibility.
- Test for accessibility, about automated testing, checks for content, design and frontend, WordPress plugins for accessibility testing, how to test with a keyboard and with a screen reader and links to complete WCAG checklists.
- WordPress and Accessibility, about WordPress, WCAG and compliance, links to the accessibility team and team handbook and an overview of plugins that help support accessibility.
We are still in the process of updating and extending the content, but much of it is done or almost done.
Work in process
The Accessibility Handbook will move to a GitHub repository on the WordPress organisation later this year.
When all the documentation in the Knowledge Base has been reviewed and updated, the relevant documentation will be copied to a new section called “Accessibility” on developer.wordpress.org. So, in fact, we return the updated info to wordpress.org, where it belongs and also will be easier to find.
After this, all the old documentation about accessibility on make.wordpress.org needs to be updated to point to this new accessibility section.
Proper documentation is an ongoing job, we need to keep updating, reviewing and extending. The web, WordPress itself, support for HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites., CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. and ARIA, assistive technologyAssistive technology Assistive technology is an umbrella term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities and also includes the process used in selecting, locating, and using them. Assistive technology promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to, or changing methods of interacting with, the technology needed to accomplish such tasks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_technology, the way people use the web, the use of AI, it all changes. It’s a work in progess.
How can you help
Read what’s there, on wpaccessibility.org, and give us feedback. We are writing this for you, please let us know if you can understand and use it.
WordCamps are the best. Last WordCamp Europe, at the contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/, a table full of people reviewed the Knowledge Base and came back with useful feedback. When you are at a WordCamp contributor day, please join the accessibility table to give feedback on wpaccessibility.org.
Request content. Do you need information about a specific topic? Are there discussions on how to handle a specific topic or component? Ask us for help and documentation, resources, or what else you need. Open an issue in the wp-a11y-docs GitHub repository with your request or pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” @rianrietveld in WordPress SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.
Are you a coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. developer? Help us with examples, or point us to good examples to add to the docs.
WordPress agencies: consider sponsoring Joe and Rian. Or give your developers, designers or content creators time to work on the documentation.
But most off all: you can help us by using the documentation for your work, let’s make WordPress usable for everyone.