Most WordPress site owners know they should care about accessibility, but few know where to start. Is the site fine? Is it a mess? Without an audit, you’re guessing. The good news is that a useful audit doesn’t require a consultant or a week of work. It requires a repeatable process, a mix of automated and manual checks, and a willingness to fix the most important problems first.
Step 1: Decide What You’re Auditing
You don’t need to test every page. Accessibility problems in WordPress tend to come from templates, themes, and plugins, so the same defect repeats across hundreds of URLs. Pick a representative sample:
- Your home page
- A typical blog post and an archive or category page
- Your main contact or lead form
- Your search results page
- If you sell things: a product page, the cart, and checkout
- Any page with unusual components, such as sliders, tabs, accordions, or embedded video
Pick a target standard too. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the safest choice. It is what most legal settlements and procurement rules point to, either directly or as a superset of WCAG 2.1 AA.
Step 2: Run an Automated Scan
Automated scanners are fast and good at catching a specific class of problems: missing alt attributes, empty buttons and links, form fields without labels, insufficient color contrast, missing document language, and duplicate IDs. They are a starting point, not a verdict. Industry estimates commonly say automated tools detect only around a third of potential WCAG issues, so a clean scan does not mean an accessible site.
When you review results, group them by cause rather than by page. Twenty “low contrast” errors may all come from one theme color. Fix the source and they all disappear.
Step 3: Test the Things Scanners Can’t
This is where most real barriers hide. Set aside an hour and work through the following by hand.
Keyboard-only navigation
Unplug your mouse, or just stop using it. Press Tab to move forward and Shift+Tab to move back. Ask yourself:
- Can you reach every link, button, and form control?
- Can you always see where focus is?
- Does the tab order follow the visual order?
- Can you open and close menus, modals, and dropdowns, and escape from them?
- Is there a skip link that jumps past the navigation?
Zoom and reflow
Zoom your browser to 200%, then 400%. Content should reflow into a single column without horizontal scrolling and without text being cut off or overlapping. Also try increasing text size only.
Screen reader spot check
You don’t need to be an expert. Turn on NVDA (free, Windows) or VoiceOver (built into macOS and iOS) and move through a page by headings and landmarks. Listen for images announced as file names, buttons announced as just “button”, and form fields with no label. If you can’t tell what a control does by sound alone, neither can your users.
Content quality
Check that alt text actually describes the image’s purpose, that link text makes sense out of context (not “click here”), that headings form a logical outline, and that videos have captions. A tool can confirm an alt attribute exists. Only a person can judge whether it’s useful.
Step 4: Check Your Plugins and Theme
On WordPress, a lot of your front end isn’t code you wrote. Page builders, form plugins, sliders, cookie banners, and popups often generate their own markup. When an issue appears, find out whether it comes from your content, your theme, or a plugin. That decides who can fix it: you, your developer, or the plugin author. If a plugin’s output is inaccessible, report it to the vendor and consider alternatives. Cookie banners and popups deserve special attention, because they appear on every page and often trap keyboard focus.
Step 5: Prioritize and Document
You will almost certainly find more issues than you can fix in a day. Rank them by impact:
- Blockers: problems that stop someone from completing a task, such as an unreachable checkout button or a form with no labels.
- Serious: things that make a task difficult, such as poor contrast on body text or missing focus indicators.
- Minor: annoyances and best-practice gaps.
Fix blockers on your highest-traffic and highest-stakes pages first. Keep a simple record of what you tested, what you found, what you fixed, and when. That record is useful if you ever receive a demand letter, and it supports an accurate accessibility statement.
Step 6: Make It a Habit
An audit is a snapshot. The next plugin update, theme change, or new landing page can reintroduce problems. Re-scan after significant changes, and schedule a recurring check, monthly at minimum for active sites. Train editors on the basics: alt text, heading order, descriptive links, and captions.
Take Action
LEWCA’s WCAG scanner finds real code-level issues in your WordPress site, which gives you a solid starting point for Step 2. It won’t replace manual testing, and no tool can promise full compliance, but it does the repetitive part quickly. Unlike overlays, LEWCA is built around fixing the underlying code rather than masking problems. LEWCA Pro adds AI-powered code fixes, scheduled scanning, and compliance reports. Download LEWCA to run your first scan, or see pricing to compare plans.