Editoria11y WordPress Plugin

A couple of weeks ago, I watched a webinar led by two accessibility specialists from Princeton University. I’ll admit that I’m slightly jealous that they have over 125 people certified by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals on the Princeton campus. I believe that I’m the only person certified on my campus, which I hope will change.^[1]Granted, Princeton’s budget is about 20 times bigger than ours, and their endowment is 787 times as much as ours…so they have a little easier time affording such niceties.

One of the parts of the webinar that intrigued me was that Princeton staff have created a WordPress plugin called Editoria11y (Links to information on the Princeton website, and the WordPress plugins website. Now that I’ve finally gotten around to my website again, I want to describe the plugin as I’m using it on this website.^[2]It is also available for Squarespace and Drupal, but I have no experience with either of those plugins.

If one is conscious about accessibility when typing in the WordPress editor, then there won’t be much to show from the plugin. It’s designed to help content creators and editors check for accessibility issues as they type.

The plugin showed me that I had a problem with heading levels on one of my pages. I was editing this website in one tab and had the external version of the website in another tab. The interesting aspect of this plugin is that as long as I was logged in on one tab, it will show any problems it finds on the other tab. On my site, sadly I had a H1 tag followed by a H3 tag. I saw a yellow exclamation point reminding me of that fact. That made it easy to see and change the particular issue. I was able to load the page and make the correction easily.

The idea behind Editoria11y^[3]Yes, the ones are intentional – the web-speak for accessibility is to have a “11” in the wording. is that instead of waiting to make the changes, one should be able to find accessibility issues while editing a post or a page. It will catch heading issues, alt text issues, bad link text (“click here” is not what one should have for link text), and a variety of other potential accessibility issues, such as including closed captions or transcripts. What it won’t catch are color issues (there are other ways to test those), nor does it work on ARIA issues^[4]Accessible Rich Internet Applications.

For web authors who are first learning about accessibility, or for experienced authors who could use a “spell-checker” type of plugin for accessibility, it’s a pretty lightweight plugin that works well on WordPress sites that use the block editor (also known as the Gutenberg editor). And it’s free. In my opinion, Editoria11y should go into most website default installations.