I'm neck deep in a site that runs Wordpress but needs to be accessible to people with visual impairment. Do you guys have any suggestions on plugins that I can buy or use to help with making the site accessible beyond coding techniques?

 

Please let me know.

 

I hope everyone is great!

I'm not sure if there is a plugin that could help with this to be honest. All I can suggest is that you ensure your markup upto scratch and you use appropiate aria-roles for screenreaders.

 

For visuals ensure you are using high contrasting colours.

 

Coding things yourself is better than using a quick solution plugin, the vast majority contain poor code and have security issues making your wordpress site vulnerable to attack. At least you have some form of quality control doing this yourself, some plugins can be good but you have to ensure they have been reviewed thoroughly by experts, personally it's not a risk I like to take.

Okay but do you know of any that might be worth looking into if I need to go the plugin route?

Accessibilty isn't really something you can just "bolt on", it has to be planned from the outset, not via an addon/plugin.

 

http://webaim.org/intro/ is a good place to start, do a web search for "accessibility" and read up, it's all good stuff to learn. http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag is also good, quite a slog but there are some excellent references to the various levels of accessibility (A to AAA).

 

There are plenty of online tools you can use which can point out some general accessibility errors, like http://wave.webaim.org/ which can give you hints for potential problem areas.

I think for accessibility needs to be planned right from the start with the overall layout and types of content that are incorporated. You have to focus on large, easily readable content and really you need audio support of some sort. I'm not recommending this link and know nothing about it but after a quick search I found this: http://www.spokentext.net/ .

 

Downloadable mp3 recordings from website text.

I think for accessibility needs to be planned right from the start with the overall layout and types of content that are incorporated. You have to focus on large, easily readable content and really you need audio support of some sort. I'm not recommending this link and know nothing about it but after a quick search I found this: http://www.spokentext.net/ .

 

Downloadable mp3 recordings from website text.

The audio thing is pretty pointless, screenreaders have been built for this very task - to allow the visually impaired to use websites. But they are reliant on good markup to understand the document.

The audio thing is pretty pointless, screenreaders have been built for this very task

 

I Think I have some work to do.

Thanks guys. I have my work to do. The client wants to use Wordpress, so I'm using that platform now just need to make sure things work correctly.

That back-end platform shouldn't matter, Being screen reader accessible is almost all down to using correct markup, to my knowledge all CMS systems allow you to structure your markup however you intend, WordPress certainly allows this.

I guess it's also important to remember that screen reader users mostly navigate using the keyboard. If you have large menus or forms on your page they will have to tab through a lot of items. To improve accessibility you can add hidden links to the main content before a menu or form so the users can tab directly to the content.

Read more here:

http://webaim.org/techniques/skipnav/