Website accessibility is extremely important. It’s extremely important that everyone, with or without disabilities, be able to access your website easily and efficiently. Today we’re going to look at one of the most popular tools out there for improving website accessibility: accessiBe WordPress. While this plugin isn’t free, it does come with quite a few features that we’re going to look at today.
accessiBe highlights various sections of your website and tells you if that section has any issues with accessibility regulations or guidelines. For example, it will let you know if there’s an issue with the color contrast between certain things on your site. Keep in mind that just because it shows an error on your page doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s anything wrong with it. It just means that it could be better than what you currently have.
After downloading and installing this plugin on my WordPress website, I noticed that the first error had to do with the link on my “About” page. The background of the text was too close in color to the background of the link. As you can see from the picture above, there shouldn’t be a problem unless someone uses a low-contrast color scheme or they have a vision impairment, but it’s better to make your website accessible to everyone.
You also get warnings for things like broken links and missing alt tags on images. These aren’t necessarily going to screw up your page but again, making your website more accessible is always good, so why not take care of these issues?
After fixing everything, this plugin pointed out. I went back to look at the results only to find that there were quite a few things it didn’t pick up on which could still use some work. Luckily accessiBe lets you know exactly what improvements need to be made, how important it thinks they are, and exactly what the changes will be. This is what I love most about this plugin – you can easily see what’s wrong with your website and also make those changes without ever having to leave the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.
Of course, you’re going to want to look at all of the changes and see if they will actually improve your website for everyone. Sometimes it’s just a matter of preference as to what is easiest for people to use, so what accessiBe thinks might not go over that well with your audience. You’ll just have to try things out and see how your visitors react.
This plugin can catch a lot of tiny details about your website that could be improved, but again, some people may not care enough to fix them. If you care about having a mostly accessible website, this is an excellent plugin for quickly and easily getting the job done!
All in all, accessiBe is a great plugin that helps you improve your website accessibility, and I highly recommend installing it on any site that you’re working on. It’s simple to use, easy to understand, and only shows problems that matter. Even if you don’t need it right now, there’s no reason not to download it because the next time someone asks for help making their website more accessible, you’ll already have everything ready to go!