Most WordPress site owners think accessibility fixes require a developer, a budget, and a multi-week project plan. Some fixes do. But a surprising number of the most common accessibility barriers on WordPress sites can be fixed this afternoon, without touching a line of PHP. Here are five that consistently show up in scans and that you can start correcting right now.
1. Add Alt Text to Every Image That Carries Meaning
This is the single most common issue flagged in accessibility scans, year after year, across every report from WebAIM to UsableNet. Screen reader users rely on alt text to know what an image shows. Without it, a screen reader either announces the filename (“IMG_4021.jpg”) or skips the image entirely, leaving a gap in the content.
The fix is not complicated, but it does require judgment:
- If an image conveys information (a chart, a product photo, a screenshot with instructions), write alt text that describes what a sighted user would take away from it — not just what’s literally in the frame.
- If an image is purely decorative (a background flourish, a divider graphic), mark it with an empty alt attribute (
alt="") so screen readers skip it instead of announcing something meaningless. - Avoid alt text that just repeats “image of” or “picture of” — screen readers already announce that it’s an image.
In the WordPress media library, click any image and fill in the “Alternative Text” field. If you’re on a page builder, check that block’s settings panel — most page builders have their own alt text field that doesn’t always sync with the media library.
2. Fix Low-Contrast Text
Light gray text on a white background looks clean in a mockup and is nearly unreadable for anyone with low vision, and genuinely hard to read for a lot of people without a diagnosed vision issue, especially outdoors or on a dim laptop screen. WCAG 2.2 AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (18pt+, or 14pt+ bold).
The usual offenders on WordPress sites are theme-default “muted” text colors used for captions, metadata, and placeholder text, plus custom brand colors picked for aesthetics without checking contrast. Pull up your site’s color palette in the Customizer and run each text/background pairing through a contrast checker. If a combination fails, darken the text, lighten the background, or both — you don’t need to abandon the color, just adjust it until it clears the threshold.
3. Give Links Text That Makes Sense Out of Context
Screen reader users frequently navigate a page by pulling up a list of every link on it, out of context, to decide where to go next. If your page is full of links labeled “click here,” “read more,” or “learn more,” that list is useless — it’s just the same three phrases repeated a dozen times.
Rewrite link text so it describes the destination on its own:
- Instead of “Click here to download our pricing guide,” use “Download our pricing guide.”
- Instead of “Learn more” at the end of a blog teaser, use “Read more about [the actual topic].”
- If a design constraint really requires short visible text like “Read more,” you can add a visually hidden span with more context that screen readers will announce, without changing how it looks.
4. Make Sure Every Form Field Has a Real Label
Placeholder text is not a label. It disappears the moment someone starts typing, it’s often low-contrast by default, and many screen readers don’t announce it the same way they announce a proper <label>. If your contact form, newsletter signup, or checkout fields rely only on placeholder text to tell users what to enter, you’re creating a real barrier for anyone using assistive technology — and a real ambiguity for anyone who gets interrupted mid-form and forgets what a field was for.
Check your form plugin’s settings for a “label” field distinct from the placeholder, and make sure labels stay visible even after a field is focused or filled in. Most popular WordPress form plugins support this natively; it’s usually a matter of turning label visibility back on rather than building it from scratch.
5. Stop Skipping Heading Levels
Headings aren’t just a font-size shortcut. Screen reader users often jump through a page heading by heading to get a sense of its structure before reading it in full — the same way a sighted user’s eye skims subheads down a page. When a page jumps from an H2 straight to an H4 because the H4 “looked right” visually, that structure breaks, and the page becomes harder to scan for exactly the users who rely on it most.
Go through your key pages and check that headings nest in order — H2, then H3 under it, then H4 under that, without skipping a level just because of how it looks. If a heading looks too big or too small at its correct level, fix that with CSS rather than by choosing a different heading tag. In the block editor, you can check a page’s heading structure with the outline view in the List View panel.
Why These Five, and What They Don’t Fix
These five issues are common because they’re easy to introduce and easy to overlook — nobody sets out to skip a heading level or forget alt text, it just happens when you’re moving fast. Fixing them will meaningfully improve the experience for screen reader users, keyboard users, and people with low vision. It will not, on its own, make your site WCAG compliant. Larger issues — complex custom widgets without proper ARIA, inaccessible PDFs, video without captions, keyboard traps in interactive components — usually need a proper scan and, in some cases, a developer’s attention. Treat these five fixes as a strong start, not a finish line.
Take Action
Manually hunting for missing alt text, low-contrast colors, and skipped heading levels across an entire site is slow and easy to get wrong. LEWCA’s WCAG scanner checks your WordPress site’s actual code for these issues — and the deeper ones a quick manual pass will miss — so you know exactly what to fix and where. Pair that with LEWCA’s accessibility toolbar to give your visitors real-time display and navigation adjustments while you work through the underlying fixes. LEWCA doesn’t claim to make any site “100% compliant” — no tool honestly can — but it gives you accurate, code-level findings instead of a false sense of security. See pricing plans or download LEWCA to start scanning your site today.