Archives: Docs
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WordPress Sidelined Its Own Accessibility Team: What the August Shakeup Means for Your Site
On August 1, 2026, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg posted a comment on the Make WordPress Accessibility blog that landed like a grenade in the accessibility community: the Accessibility Team, he said, had “overstepped its authority, usefulness, and charter.” The comment came in response to a routine request from longtime core contributor Joe Dolson to extend…
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UsableNet’s 2026 Midyear Report: Accessibility Lawsuits Just Hit a Record High — And Widgets Still Aren’t Stopping Them
Halfway through 2026, the numbers are in, and they’re not good. UsableNet’s 2026 Midyear Report found that the first six months of this year produced the highest volume of digital accessibility lawsuits the firm has ever tracked, putting the full-year total on pace to blow past 6,000 filings. If that holds, 2026 will be the…
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W3C Is Studying How AI Is Changing Web Accessibility: What It Means for Your WordPress Site
The W3C’s Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group has published a new Editor’s Draft tackling a question a lot of WordPress site owners are already living with: what happens to web accessibility when AI is writing the alt text, generating the layout, and even claiming to fix the code? The document, titled “Accessibility of Machine Learning…
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ARIA Attributes Explained: When to Use Them (and When Not To)
ARIA has a reputation problem. Developers hear “accessibility” and reach for aria-label, role, and aria-hidden like seasoning, sprinkling them onto markup in the hope that more ARIA means more accessible. It doesn’t. The first rule of ARIA — literally written into the W3C spec — is: don’t use ARIA if a native HTML element already…
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DOJ Says WCAG Isn’t the Official ADA Standard: What That Actually Means for Your WordPress Site
In February 2026, the Department of Justice quietly dropped a footnote that sent a ripple through the accessibility legal world: in a filing opposing a class action settlement, DOJ stated that it “does not endorse WCAG as the appropriate or necessary standard” for auxiliary aids and services under Title III of the ADA. Within days,…
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Skip Links: The Simple Feature That Makes a Big Difference
Tab through your homepage right now, before reading another word. Count how many times you have to press Tab before you reach your main content. If the answer is “more than one,” you’ve just experienced what keyboard and screen reader users deal with on every single page load — and there’s a decades-old, five-minute fix…
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Washington’s July 1 Deadline Just Passed: What the WCAG 2.2 AA Mandate Means Even If You’re Not a State Agency
On July 1, 2026, Washington became one of the first states to impose a hard WCAG 2.2 Level AA deadline on its own executive branch agencies — and on the vendors who build and maintain sites for them. If you build, host, or maintain WordPress sites for clients who touch government contracts in any state,…
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Missouri Just Passed a Law Targeting “Abusive” Accessibility Lawsuits — Here’s What It Actually Means for Your WordPress Site
On August 28, 2026, Missouri becomes the first state to give businesses a legal weapon against “drive-by” website accessibility lawsuits — the kind filed by a single plaintiff or law firm against dozens of small sites with boilerplate complaints and a settlement demand attached. Senate Bill 907, the “Acts Against Abusive Website Access” law, lets…
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Understanding Color Contrast: The WCAG Requirements WordPress Site Owners Can’t Ignore
Color contrast failures are the single most common WCAG violation on the web — accounting for more than 80% of automatically detectable accessibility errors across the top million websites. Yet for most WordPress site owners, contrast is an afterthought: you pick colors that look good on your screen, launch the site, and move on. The…
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WordPress Just Raised the Bar on Accessibility-Ready Themes: What the June 30 Deadline Means for Your Site
Tomorrow — June 30, 2026 — WordPress is pulling the accessibility-ready tag from themes that haven’t met its updated requirements. If your site runs one of those themes, you may wake up to discover your “accessible” theme no longer carries that designation. Here’s what changed, who’s affected, and what you should do before the deadline…