Editing the Page
Wow, that accessibility page was a wild ride! There were lots of weird things going on, but I think it looks better now. I added the page to my top menu for future reference. I learned that it’s good practice to make a note if a link will take the user to a new tab, and that typography is important! Something that I like about this theme is the font, because I think it’s simple and easy to read.
Accessibility Plugin
I decided to install the Accessibility Checker plugin by Equalize Digital. I love being able to see the details about what needs to be changed to make my posts and pages more accessible. It’s really helpful in pointing out things that I wouldn’t have normally spotted! Another thing I learned is that the heading structure order is important. I used to use smaller headers just because I liked how they looked better, but the plugin I installed flagged my headings, so I changed them.
Checking my Website
Being able to use the Accessibility Checker to look through my website is certainly helpful, but I feel like the defaults of this theme often need to be changed. For example, the default “black” text is actually a dark grey, and the accessibility summary keeps telling me that the color contrast isn’t high enough. There’s something that keeps popping up saying “ARIA hidden”. I’m not sure what that means. Something else that bothers me is that WordPress tells me that the blue highlighted link text is too low contrast, but I can’t figure out how to change it!
As you probably noticed some of the things the accessibility checker tells you aren’t really within your control to change (unless you start dabbling in the code a bit). Sometimes font color is easy to change via the additional CSS feature in the customizer. Maybe something to try? 🙂 Not sure where the ARIA hidden label is popping up (or what it is marking) but it is often intended to hide additional visual things (like decorations or icons that serve no informational purpose) from screen readers so they don’t have to tab through things that aren’t useful to them. It could be the theme is using this tag correctly or incorrectly, or just bringing it to your attention that it exists (and therefore those things are invisible to screen readers and other assistive technologies).