WordPress

WordPress powers a substantial share of the public web, which makes its accessibility a matter of public-web-scale consequence. The project has had an active accessibility team for many years, contributing fixes to core, reviewing themes, and pushing back when proposed changes would harm assistive technology users.

The WordPress Accessibility team maintains coding standards, runs audits, and reviews themes submitted with the accessibility-ready tag, which signals a theme has been checked against defined accessibility requirements. The accessibility of Gutenberg, the block editor introduced in 2018, has been a sustained area of debate within the community. The honest position: core WordPress is more accessible than most content management systems (CMSs), significant gaps remain, and the accessibility of any given site depends heavily on the theme and plugins chosen.

Start from an accessibility-ready theme. Avoid plugins that inject inaccessible widgets or overlays. Use the block editor's accessibility features rather than forcing layout with custom HTML. Test the rendered front end with a screen reader and a keyboard.