WordPress is the most widely used content management system in the world, powering everything from personal blogs to enterprise websites. While WordPress core has made significant accessibility improvements, the vast ecosystem of themes and plugins means most WordPress sites have accessibility issues. Under the EAA, any WordPress site providing services to EU consumers must meet EN 301 549 requirements.
Common WordPress accessibility issues
Theme accessibility varies dramatically
The WordPress theme marketplace has thousands of themes, and accessibility quality ranges from excellent to non-existent. Many popular themes use div-based layouts instead of semantic HTML, lack skip navigation links, and have poor heading structure.
Plugin-generated content is often inaccessible
Contact forms, sliders, galleries, popups, and page builders inject HTML that frequently fails WCAG requirements. Form plugins may lack proper labels, slider plugins may not be keyboard navigable, and page builders may produce non-semantic markup.
Image alt text management at scale
WordPress's media library makes it easy to upload images without alt text. On sites with thousands of images, retroactively adding descriptive alt text is one of the biggest remediation challenges.
Colour contrast in theme customisations
WordPress theme customisers let users change colours freely - often resulting in combinations that fail WCAG contrast requirements without any warning.
Dynamic content and AJAX loading
WordPress sites using infinite scroll, AJAX-loaded comments, or dynamic content filtering often fail to announce changes to screen readers, creating a confusing experience for assistive technology users.
PDF and document accessibility
Many WordPress sites host PDF documents (reports, menus, forms) that are completely inaccessible. These are often overlooked in accessibility audits but are explicitly in scope under the EAA.
How Lumi works with WordPress
Lumi crawls your WordPress site page by page - scanning posts, pages, custom post types, archive pages, and any plugin-generated content. Our five engines detect issues across your theme markup, plugin output, media content, and forms. Set up monitoring to catch regressions from WordPress core updates, theme changes, and plugin updates.
WordPress-specific WCAG gotchas
Page builders produce non-semantic HTML
Popular page builders (Elementor, WPBakery, Divi) generate deeply nested, div-heavy markup that can confuse screen readers and break heading hierarchy - even when content looks correct visually.
WordPress updates can introduce regressions
Core, theme, and plugin updates happen frequently on WordPress. Each update can change rendered HTML, breaking previously accessible functionality.
Custom fields and ACF content often lacks structure
Advanced Custom Fields and similar plugins let developers create flexible content - but without enforcing accessibility. Custom field output rarely includes proper ARIA attributes or semantic structure.
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Frequently asked questions
Is WordPress accessible by default?
WordPress core has an accessibility team and follows accessibility coding standards, but the rendered output depends heavily on your theme, plugins, and content. Most real-world WordPress sites have significant accessibility gaps.
Which WordPress themes are most accessible?
WordPress.org has an 'accessibility-ready' tag for themes that meet basic accessibility requirements. However, 'accessibility-ready' is not the same as WCAG 2.2 AA compliant - it covers a subset of requirements. Themes like Twenty Twenty-Four (the default theme) are a good starting point.
Can accessibility plugins fix my WordPress site?
Overlay plugins that claim to fix accessibility with a single script do not work and can make accessibility worse. Genuine accessibility plugins (like WP Accessibility by Joe Dolson) can help with specific issues, but there's no substitute for proper theme structure and content practices.
Does the EAA apply to WordPress blogs?
If your WordPress site provides services to EU consumers - including e-commerce, subscriptions, or digital content - the EAA likely applies. Pure personal blogs without commercial activity are generally not in scope, but the line can be blurry for monetised content sites.
Related resources
Last reviewed: April 2026. Content is reviewed quarterly for accuracy.