Keeping WordPress content accessible after handover

Most WordPress sites we audit for accessibility launched in reasonable shape. The theme had proper landmarks, focus styles and color contrast, and an audit before launch caught the obvious issues. Then editors started publishing. Within a year, pages have images without alternative text, headings chosen for their size rather than their meaning, link text that says "click here," embedded videos without captions, and PDFs nobody can read with a screen reader. Accessibility is not a property of a theme. It is a property of the content, and content changes every day.

Why sites drift after launch

Editors are not careless. They are busy, they are rarely trained in accessibility, and the tools often make the inaccessible choice the easiest one. The drift we see most often:

• Missing or unhelpful alt text, often the file name or "image of" followed by nothing useful.
• Skipped heading levels, because an H4 looked right in that spot.
• Vague links like "read more" repeated many times on a page.
• Color and contrast problems from custom colors or text placed over busy images.
• Inaccessible documents, such as scanned PDFs without tags or text layers.
• Embedded media without captions or transcripts.

Each of these can be prevented, caught or corrected with a mix of design, tooling and habit.

Build accessibility into the blocks

The most effective fixes remove bad options before editors see them. When we build or refine a theme, we design the blocks so that accessible content is the default:

1. Constrained colors. Editors choose from a palette where every text and background combination meets WCAG AA contrast. Custom colors are disabled.
2. Heading guidance. Patterns ship with a correct heading structure, and custom blocks expose semantic heading levels with a short explanation rather than a visual size picker.
3. Required alt text decisions. Custom image blocks prompt for alt text and offer an explicit "decorative image" option, so an empty alt attribute is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
4. Accessible components by default. Accordions, tabs, carousels and modals are built once with correct keyboard support and ARIA, so editors cannot assemble inaccessible versions from generic blocks.
5. Text over images handled safely. Cover blocks apply a tested overlay that guarantees contrast, instead of relying on the editor's eye.

The best accessibility guideline is the one editors never need to remember, because the block already made the right choice.

Menus, forms and search deserve the same treatment. Navigation built from the site editor should keep a logical order and visible focus states, form blocks should always pair fields with real labels and clear error messages, and the search results template should announce the number of results. These are theme-level decisions, but editors can undo them easily, so we lock the structural parts where it matters.

Guide editors in the moment

Training helps, but a one-off session is forgotten within months. Guidance works best inside the editor, at the moment of decision. We add short help text to custom block controls, a pre-publish checklist that flags common issues, and a one-page style guide linked from the dashboard with examples specific to the organization's content.

The pre-publish check looks for:

• Images without alt text that are not marked decorative.
• Heading levels that skip, such as an H2 followed directly by an H4.
• Links whose text is generic or duplicated with different destinations.
• Embedded videos without a captions track or linked transcript.
• Uploaded PDFs, with a reminder to check for an accessible version or an HTML alternative.

The check warns rather than blocks, because there are always legitimate exceptions. In practice, warnings alone reduced new alt text omissions on one university site by more than 80% within two months.

Automated checks and periodic manual reviews

Automated tools catch roughly a third of accessibility issues reliably, mostly the mechanical ones such as missing alt attributes, contrast failures and missing form labels. That is valuable, and we run them on a schedule across the whole site, not just the pages checked at launch. Results feed a simple dashboard that shows trends by section and flags new issues to the team that owns that content.

The remaining issues need people. Whether alt text is actually meaningful, whether a page makes sense with a screen reader, whether a complex form can be completed by keyboard alone: these require manual testing. We recommend a light manual review of the most visited and most important templates every quarter, and a fuller review once a year or after any significant redesign. For organizations with legal obligations, those reviews are documented to support their accessibility statement.

Documents and media

PDFs are the largest accessibility gap on many institutional sites. Where content is meant to be read on screen, we encourage publishing it as a web page rather than a PDF. Where a PDF is genuinely needed, such as a form to print or a formal report, it should be exported from the source document with tags, reading order and alternative text intact, and scanned documents should be replaced or remediated. For video, captions should be reviewed rather than accepted straight from automatic generation, and longer content benefits from a transcript.

Our accessibility audits cover both the theme and a representative sample of content, and remediation often includes Gutenberg block development to bake the fixes into the editing experience. Ongoing checks and reporting fit naturally into our monthly care plans.

Keep your site accessible for good

Share your site and tell us who publishes content and how often. We will reply within 24 hours with a fixed-price quote for an audit and a plan to keep your content accessible long after launch.