The internet is a powerful medium that has grown exponentially over the past two decades. The World Wide Web now hosts billions of websites, making information, services, and products available to anyone with an internet connection. However, not all Internet users have the same capabilities. It’s been estimated that there are as many as 300 million individuals worldwide with some sort of disability that may affect their ability to access the web. That means around 20% of people browsing your site will have a disability.
Building an accessible website isn’t just about ensuring content is readable by search engine crawlers and browsers; it’s also about ensuring users with disabilities can understand and use information from your site. For example, users with partial or total blindness, color blindness, or other visual disabilities rely on text-to-speech to access information. In contrast, users with limited dexterity may need large click surfaces and keyboard shortcuts.
To help website owners understand how to make their site accessible, we created the accessiBe WordPress plugin for WordPress blogs and sites. The free plugin connects to our service and allows you to quickly enable our features with just a few clicks.
The following guide will show you how to install and configure accessiBe on your WordPress site or plugin, so it’s easy for visitors with disabilities to use without issues.
WordPress plugins for accessibe
You can get the free accessiBe WordPress plugin from the WordPress plugin directory here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/accessibe/.
The accessiBe plugin is easy to install and will help make your site or blog accessible and user-friendly for people with disabilities. This article will show you how to install the plugin, enable some of our key features on your WordPress site, and some additional configurations you may wish to explore further if time permits.
Enable accessiBe on a WordPress website
To get started, you simply need to install and activate the accessiBe plugin. Once activated, the accessiBe options will appear on your Settings tab.
Once you have enabled accessiBe on your site, there are several features you can enable with just a few clicks:
- Reading Experience – Enhances readability for visitors using assistive technologies.
- Keyboard Shortcuts – The quickest way to navigate a website. Ideal for users with reduced dexterity or blindness.
- Visual Widgets – Enhance the clickable area of buttons, links, etc. Ideal for users who have limited dexterity.
- Meta Tags – Improve SEO by adding appropriate meta tags to the header of every page.
- Lazy Loading – Image thumbnails and video players load only when they come into the viewing area.
- Usability Testing – The plugin includes a built-in testing feature to see how well visitors with disabilities can use your site before launching it live.
- Organize Site Content – The plugin works by allowing accessiBe staff or third-party testers to report on issues with a site’s design and then work with developers to fix any problems before the website goes live.
To access the plugin settings page, click on the Plugins tab in your WordPress dashboard, locate the accessiBe plugin at the top of the list and click on ‘accessiBe’ (alternatively, you can access this page from the Settings tab in your WordPress dashboard).
