The A11y Plugin
Stop paying accessibility subscription fees and give your site real control over your site's presentation. A WordPress accessibility plugin that is actually useful for folks, with backend reporting in your dashboard that tells you what to improve on your site.
Best of all... it's free!
Be sure to check out what The A11y Plugin does not doRunning right now
Not a video and not a screenshot. It is installed on this page, right now. Everything you change saves to your own browser, and nothing about this visit leaves your device.
The toolbar helps in the browser. It does not replace this.
What it does
Fourteen adjustments and six presets. Bigger text, looser spacing, higher contrast, a dyslexia-friendly typeface, a reading mask, stopped animations. Set once, remembered across your site, stored on their own device.
Try it on this page ↑Add the pages that matter. Press check. Get a list that opens with what you can fix yourself in WordPress this afternoon. 41 rules rewritten out of developer jargon, with real contrast measured from computed styles.
See how it sorts the work ↓Inside your dashboard
No score, no dials, no chart to interpret. The first group is open by default because that is where the wins are, and every finding carries the sentence that tells you what to change.
Download the pluginSomeone using a screen reader hears the file name, or nothing at all, instead of what the picture shows.
Open each page, click the image, and write a short sentence describing what it shows. Do not start with "image of".
Below the 4.5:1 minimum. Somebody has to pick a color, which is why this is not in the first group.
A theme-level fix. This group is an itemised scope of work, already written, for whoever you hand it to.
The Accessibility screen in wp-admin, version 0.6.0.
A Tuesday afternoon with it
Every other tool sorts by severity, so item one is a critical ARIA fault the person reading it cannot act on. They close the tab. Here is how it actually goes.
A real browser engine loads every page you track and reads the computed styles, so contrast is measured rather than guessed. Six pages takes under a minute.
"12 images have no description" is editable in WordPress, so it opens first. A 3.9:1 button needs a color chosen. A focus-order fault needs the theme. You always know which pile you are looking at, and the third group is an itemised scope of work, already written.
Plain instructions and the exact pages, no CSS selector unless you ask. Fix, re-check, and the count drops. Every run is kept, which is the remediation record you would want if anyone ever asks for one.
No account, no license key, no phone home.
Yup, I'll send you an email once 0.6.0 it clears review on WordPress.org.
Before you install
Automated checks catch roughly a third of accessibility problems. Clearing this list is real progress; it is not the same as being done. Saying so is the reason to trust the rest of the page. Anything that will not print its own limits is asking you to take a claim on faith.
Got more questions? The FAQ below covers them, including the awkward ones.
Read the FAQChecks run axe-core in a real browser frame, so color contrast is measured rather than guessed.
The toolbar lives in its own shadow root, so your theme cannot break it and it cannot break your theme.
It only ever loads pages from your own domain. Nothing is fetched from anywhere else.
Builds a statement page on the W3C structure, starting at partially conformant.
No, and be suspicious of anything that says it does. Conformance is a property of your code, established by testing. This finds the machine-detectable problems and explains how to fix them, which is real progress and roughly a third of the picture. The rest needs manual testing with assistive technology.
Overlays try to rewrite your site's code as the page loads. That approach was the subject of a $1 million FTC action in 2025, and sites running these tools still appear in a quarter of ADA web lawsuits. This plugin does the two things that genuinely work: it gives visitors presentation controls, and it tells you what to fix. It does not touch your markup.
Because a score would tell you nothing you can act on, and it would quietly become a compliance claim. The screen opens with the work instead.
No. Checks run a real browser engine, which is the only way to measure color contrast honestly, and scheduled tasks have no browser. Anything advertising automatic scans is either doing a shallow HTML parse or paying for a headless browser service. Instead it tracks how long it has been and reminds you, with a default window of 30 days.
About 3.4 KB inlined in the head so saved preferences apply before first paint, and about 6.6 KB deferred to the footer. No external requests, no jQuery, no framework. Nothing loads at all when the toolbar is switched off. The 559 KB scanning engine loads only on the check screen in your admin, and never touches the front end.
Nowhere. Preferences live in the visitor's own browser. The plugin makes no network requests to anything, sets no cookies, and has no account system.
Nothing. It is GPL-2.0-or-later, self-hosted, with no account, no per-scan cost, and no per-client fee. If you run twelve client sites, you install it twelve times and pay nothing twelve times.
The toolbar renders in a shadow root specifically so aggressive theme CSS cannot break it. Two honest caveats. Text scaling only moves themes that size text in rem, so a theme with hardcoded pixel sizes will not respond. And contrast modes apply a filter over the whole page, which some layouts take better than others, so you can switch that control off.
Yes, and it is worth stating plainly, because an inaccessible accessibility widget is a common failure mode in this category. The panel is keyboard operable end to end, traps focus while open, closes on Escape, returns focus to the trigger, exposes state through ARIA, uses live regions for adjustments and scan progress, respects reduced-motion preferences, and never conveys information by color alone.
Version 0.6.0 is in review. Until it is listed you can download the zip here and install it from Plugins, Add New, Upload. Leave your email below and you will get one message when it goes live, and nothing else.
How I work
I start with the person on the other side of the screen. That is the whole method. It is why this plugin opens with the visitor's controls instead of your dashboard, and it is the same instinct behind every donation flow, intake form, and rebuild I take on.
If that is how you want your project handled, I would like to hear about it.
