Chris Winter, November 2025
For this blog, I am joined by my former IBM colleague, Herb Miller as co-author.
As WordPress is used by more than 500 million websites, its popularity impacts the overall accessibility of the web and in this blog, we explore the results of this.
WordPress is used by 564 million websites which represents 43.4% of the web. According to the WebAIM 2025 report WordPress is used by 24% (241,401) of the top one million websites evaluated.
WordPress is available as free open-source downloadable software and it is the responsibility of the downloader to provide the hosting of any websites. Alternatively, a hosted service can be purchased from WordPress.com. The estimates for the split between free and fee are 70-90% free with 10-30% fee-paying.
We set out to prove or disprove the following hypothesis from the previous blog: It is possible to improve the accessibility of WordPress webpages.
The methodology we used was to perform a deep dive on five homepages with numerous Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance errors together with a selection of homepages that did not use WordPress for comparison. These websites are not published. The number of WCAG compliance errors of the five homepages selected ranged from 812 to 1,904. The focus was on the top three WordPress compliance errors as depicted in the table below.
Our findings are as follows:
- Low contrast text. We discovered that the colour of fonts was often set outside of WordPress itself. The highest number of contrast errors in a single homepage was 1,691. This number was reduced to zero by modifying two lines of the cascading style sheet (CSS). We also encountered some websites with contrast errors due to the colours defined in the organisation’s brand. We referred to this issue as the ‘corporate palette’.
WordPress does have a built-in contrast checker. From the results appears that its warnings are ignored and / or overruled. - Missing alternative text for images. This is the hard slog of entering a textual description for images that can be read by a screen reader. There are currently no built-in WordPress features.
- Empty links. A problem for all users of the web that is not limited to disabled users. There are currently no built-in WordPress features.
We believe that the propensity of WordPress accessibility errors is due to its poor usage by organisations and people who use it. They know little about accessibility (unconscious bias) or they do not care (conscious bias).
It is obvious that all the above compliance errors could be identified and fixed by using the WebAIM WAVE browser extensions before publishing.
It is clear to us that WordPress is committed to Accessibility in general and WCAG in particular. The WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards state that ‘All new or updated code released in WordPress must conform with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 at level AA’. Furthermore, we collaborated with the established WordPress accessibility group who are knowledgeable, dedicated and very helpful.
We did not perform a deep dive into why homepages using Divi (a fee-based product based on WordPress) recorded fewer compliance errors than base WordPress. However, we believe this is due to Divis’s templates being more accessible and out-of-the-box.
About the authors
Chris Winter FIET FBCS CITP is a former IBM Fellow, now retired. He is now an evangelist for digital accessibility. Herb Miller is User Interface specialist with over 40 years’ experience, mainly with IBM. He has been a WordPress specialist since retiring from IBM 16 years ago. Primarily a plugin and theme developer.