Do accessibility apps or plugins for WordPress make me compliant?

No. Overlay widgets inject a script that tries to repair issues in the browser at display time. Regulators and courts have rejected this approach: the US FTC fined a leading overlay vendor $1 million in 2025 for deceptive compliance claims, the European Commission has stated overlays do not confer conformance, and hundreds of US lawsuits in recent years have been filed against sites that were running an overlay at the time. Real compliance means fixing your actual markup and keeping evidence that you did.

How often should I scan my WordPress site?

Weekly, and immediately after any theme, app, or plugin update. WordPress sites change through updates and content edits even when nobody touches the code, and each change can introduce regressions. A scan history with timestamps also doubles as compliance evidence if you ever receive a demand letter.

Can an automated scan alone make me compliant?

Not by itself, and any vendor claiming otherwise is misleading you. Roughly a third of WCAG success criteria can be checked by a machine, though those criteria account for the majority of violations found in real audits by volume. An automated scan is the fastest way to find and fix the bulk of your issues and to prove ongoing diligence, but full conformance also requires human judgment for things like alt-text quality, logical reading order, and form error recovery. The strongest position combines automated monitoring with a periodic manual audit.

What laws apply to my WordPress site?

If you sell to EU consumers, the European Accessibility Act (enforced since June 2025). In the US, the ADA as applied by two decades of case law, with online retail the most-sued category. UK traders face the Equality Act 2010, and Ontario organizations with 50+ employees fall under AODA. The common technical thread is WCAG conformance at level AA.

WCAG accessibility checker for WordPress

WordPress sites face the same legal exposure as any other website. The European Accessibility Act (enforced since June 2025) and the ADA both apply regardless of what platform you build on. Using WordPress does not make you compliant out of the box.

WordPress core is reasonably accessible; themes and page builders are where violations concentrate. Common failures: heading levels skipped for visual styling, slider/carousel plugins without keyboard support, contact-form plugins with unlabeled fields, and low-contrast button colors baked into the theme.

Fixing accessibility on WordPress

Prefer accessibility-ready themes, audit after every plugin update, and fix templates rather than layering an overlay plugin on top. Overlays don't confer compliance and have drawn FTC action.

Which pages of your WordPress site to scan first

Scan your homepage, a representative post, a page built with your page builder, and every form (contact, newsletter, comments). Page-builder output changes with every builder update, so re-scan after updating plugins, not just after editing content.

What WCAG 2.2 AA actually requires

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is organized around four principles: content must be perceivable (e.g. images have text alternatives, text has sufficient contrast), operable (everything works with a keyboard, users have enough time, nothing traps focus), understandable (pages are readable, predictable, and help users avoid mistakes), and robust (markup is parseable by assistive technologies like screen readers). Each guideline has testable success criteria at three levels: A (minimum), AA (the level essentially every law references), and AAA (aspirational). Conformance at AA means meeting all A and AA criteria. The current version is WCAG 2.2, published in October 2023, which added nine criteria to WCAG 2.1, including minimum target sizes for buttons and links, visible focus indicators, and easier authentication.

The violations that actually show up on real sites

Across the millions of pages tested in large-scale studies like WebAIM's annual survey of the top one million homepages, the same handful of failures dominate: low-contrast text (found on roughly four out of five homepages), images missing alternative text, form inputs without labels, empty links and buttons, and missing document language. In our own scans of e-commerce sites, we also routinely find keyboard traps in carousels and mega-menus, focus indicators removed with CSS, modal dialogs that screen readers never announce, and touch targets far below the 24 by 24 pixel minimum WCAG 2.2 requires. Most of these are cheap to fix individually. The expensive part is finding them all and keeping them fixed as the site changes, which is exactly what automated monitoring is for.

Why continuous scanning matters

WordPress sites change constantly: theme updates, new apps or plugins, content edits by non-developers. A site that passed a scan last quarter can fail today without anyone touching the code deliberately. Weekly automated re-scans catch regressions when they're one fix away, not fifty.

Compliance checklist

Scan your homepage, a product/content page, and your checkout or lead form
Fix critical violations in your theme/templates, not with an overlay widget
Re-scan after every WordPress theme or plugin/app update
Keep the scan history as compliance evidence

Frequently asked questions

Is my WordPress site automatically WCAG compliant?: No. WordPress gives you a platform whose baseline can be made accessible, but conformance is determined by your specific theme, content, and third-party additions. WordPress core is reasonably accessible; themes and page builders are where violations concentrate. Common failures: heading levels skipped for visual styling, slider/carousel plugins without keyboard support, contact-form plugins with unlabeled fields, and low-contrast button colors baked into the theme.
Do accessibility apps or plugins for WordPress make me compliant?: No. Overlay widgets inject a script that tries to repair issues in the browser at display time. Regulators and courts have rejected this approach: the US FTC fined a leading overlay vendor $1 million in 2025 for deceptive compliance claims, the European Commission has stated overlays do not confer conformance, and hundreds of US lawsuits in recent years have been filed against sites that were running an overlay at the time. Real compliance means fixing your actual markup and keeping evidence that you did.
How often should I scan my WordPress site?: Weekly, and immediately after any theme, app, or plugin update. WordPress sites change through updates and content edits even when nobody touches the code, and each change can introduce regressions. A scan history with timestamps also doubles as compliance evidence if you ever receive a demand letter.
Can an automated scan alone make me compliant?: Not by itself, and any vendor claiming otherwise is misleading you. Roughly a third of WCAG success criteria can be checked by a machine, though those criteria account for the majority of violations found in real audits by volume. An automated scan is the fastest way to find and fix the bulk of your issues and to prove ongoing diligence, but full conformance also requires human judgment for things like alt-text quality, logical reading order, and form error recovery. The strongest position combines automated monitoring with a periodic manual audit.
What laws apply to my WordPress site?: If you sell to EU consumers, the European Accessibility Act (enforced since June 2025). In the US, the ADA as applied by two decades of case law, with online retail the most-sued category. UK traders face the Equality Act 2010, and Ontario organizations with 50+ employees fall under AODA. The common technical thread is WCAG conformance at level AA.