WordPress Accessibility Checker

WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the internet — roughly 835 million sites. From small business brochure sites to major news outlets and university portals, WordPress is the default platform for web publishing. That ubiquity means accessibility failures on WordPress affect more people than on any other CMS.

WordPress core has an active accessibility team and ships with accessible markup, but the ecosystem of 60,000+ plugins and 12,000+ themes is where problems emerge. A poorly coded contact form plugin or a page builder that outputs div soup can undo all of core's good work. With the ADA Title II April 2026 deadline affecting government and public-sector WordPress sites, and the EAA applying to European businesses, automated scanning is no longer optional.

CompliScan's scanner consistently finds these patterns across WordPress installations:

• Page builder output lacking semantic HTML — Elementor, Divi, and WPBakery often generate deeply nested <div> structures without proper heading hierarchy, landmark roles, or list semantics.
• Plugin-injected inaccessible forms — contact form and popup plugins frequently use custom-styled checkboxes and radio buttons that aren't keyboard operable and lack programmatic labels.
• Image-heavy themes with missing alt text — featured images, background images used as content, and decorative images without alt="" create noise for screen readers.
• WordPress media embeds without captions — embedded videos and audio players from oEmbed providers often lack captions or transcripts, violating WCAG 1.2.2.
• Inconsistent heading levels — jumping from H1 to H4, or having multiple H1 elements, is rampant in page-builder layouts and confuses assistive technology navigation.

Run your WordPress site through CompliScan's free scanner to get a prioritized list of violations. The AI engine generates fixes that account for WordPress's template hierarchy and common plugin patterns.

For heading structure, audit your page builder layouts — most builders let you set heading levels per block. Ensure one H1 per page and a logical H2 > H3 > H4 cascade. For forms, switch to plugins with proven accessibility like Gravity Forms or use <label for="..."> elements that explicitly associate with inputs.

For theme-level issues, check if your theme declares "accessibility-ready" in its style.css tags — WordPress.org reviews these themes against specific accessibility requirements. If your current theme fails badly, consider migrating to an accessibility-ready theme like developer-focused themes from Theme Flavor or the default Twenty Twenty-Five theme. CompliScan provides CSS and PHP snippets you can add to your child theme's functions.php to patch specific violations.

State and local government websites built on WordPress face the April 24, 2026 ADA Title II deadline, which requires WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance. Many municipalities run WordPress — it's the most common CMS in the public sector — and many are not yet compliant.

Federal sites must already meet Section 508 requirements (which reference WCAG 2.0 AA), and many federal contractors need their WordPress properties to comply as well. In the EU, the Web Accessibility Directive already requires public sector websites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA.

CompliScan's automated checks cover the testable criteria and flag issues by severity so your team can prioritize. For WordPress multisite installations, our paid plans support scanning multiple subsites from a single dashboard, tracking compliance scores over time as you remediate.