Free WordPress Accessibility Checker
Enter your URL to scan your WordPress site the way a visitor's browser sees it, after your theme and every plugin have rendered the page. CompliaScan tests against WCAG 2.2, the standard courts reference when they ask whether a site is ADA compliant, and returns results in seconds.
Where WordPress Sites Break Accessibility
WordPress powers a large share of the web, but running on WordPress says nothing about whether a site is accessible. Accessibility lives in the specific theme, plugins, and content you assemble, and each of those can introduce barriers the CMS itself never prevents. These are the patterns we see most often.
Theme and plugin conflicts
Your theme controls headings, colors, and landmarks, and every plugin injects its own markup on top. A slider plugin can output images with no alt, two plugins can each emit an h1, and a theme update can quietly change a color pair so it no longer meets contrast. Because the rendered page is a blend of all of them, an issue can appear that exists in none of the parts on its own.
Gutenberg block pitfalls
Core blocks are mostly accessible, but it's easy to pick a heading level by how big it looks rather than where it belongs, which skips levels in the outline. Custom color settings on Paragraph and Button blocks can drop below the contrast threshold, and third-party block libraries and reusable patterns vary widely in quality.
Page builder div soup (Elementor, Divi)
Elementor, Divi, and similar builders give you visual control by nesting layers of div and span. That flexibility often produces clickable divs instead of real buttons and links, icon-only controls with no accessible name, and headings chosen for size instead of structure. Screen readers and keyboards rely on real semantic elements, which builder output frequently skips.
Missing alt text in the Media Library
Alt text is entered per image in the Media Library, and anything you inserted before filling that field keeps an empty alt. The same photo reused across posts may need different alt in each spot, and genuinely decorative images should have empty alt rather than no attribute at all. It's one of the most common WordPress findings and one of the easiest to fix.
Heading hierarchy from your theme
Many themes wrap the site title in an h1 on every page, so your post's own title becomes a second h1. Others use h2 for every widget heading in the sidebar, interrupting the content outline. Screen reader users navigate by headings, so a scrambled hierarchy makes the page harder to move through even when the text reads fine.
Contact form plugin labels (CF7, Gravity Forms)
Contact Form 7's default markup often leans on placeholder text instead of a real label tied to each field, and error messages may not be programmatically linked to the input that failed. Gravity Forms handles this better out of the box, but custom CSS that visually hides labels, or wrapping label text without a matching id, still trips up screen readers.
Do WordPress Accessibility Plugins Make You Compliant?
Search the plugin directory for accessibility and you'll find two very different kinds of tools. It's worth knowing which is which before you rely on either one.
Overlay and accessibility widget plugins
The first kind is the overlay: a single script that drops a floating toolbar onto your site and advertises one-click compliance. It can't deliver that. An overlay sits on top of your existing HTML. It doesn't rewrite your heading structure, add real labels to your forms, or fix the color values baked into your theme.
WCAG conformance is judged on the actual markup a browser and screen reader receive, not on a widget layered over it. Many assistive-technology users disable overlays outright, and several overlay vendors have themselves been named as defendants in accessibility lawsuits. The controls they add for sighted users can be pleasant, but they are not remediation.
Accessibility-ready themes and well-built plugins
The second kind is genuinely useful: themes and plugins built with accessibility in mind. On WordPress.org, look for the accessibility-ready tag in the theme directory. Themes carrying it have passed a manual review by the Theme Review Team covering keyboard navigation, visible focus, skip links, form labeling, and minimum contrast.
Starting from an accessibility-ready theme gives you a solid base, but it only covers what the theme itself controls. Your plugins, your page builder, and the content you publish every day can still introduce issues the tag never touched. That gap is exactly what an automated scan of your real, published pages is meant to surface.
The honest bottom line on plugins
No plugin, overlay, or theme tag makes a WordPress site compliant by itself, and anything marketed that way is overselling. Accessibility is a property of the final rendered page, so the only way to know where you stand is to test the page your visitors actually load. That's what the scan above does, and it's free with no signup.
What Our Scan Catches on a WordPress Site
CompliaScan loads your published page exactly as a visitor's browser does, after WordPress, your theme, and every plugin have rendered it, then runs axe-core plus nine custom checks against WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA. That means it tests the real output, not your source templates. Here is what it reliably flags on a WordPress site.
Empty or missing image alt
Media Library images inserted without alt text, plus slider and gallery plugins that omit the attribute entirely.
Color contrast failures
Text and buttons whose theme or block color choices fall below the WCAG contrast thresholds, including pairs a theme update quietly changed.
Unlabeled form fields
Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, and search inputs where the field isn't programmatically tied to a visible label.
Broken heading structure
Skipped levels, duplicate h1s from the theme plus the post title, and headings picked for size in the block editor or a page builder.
Icon buttons without names
Menu toggles, social icons, and page-builder buttons that render with no discernible text for screen readers.
Invalid or misused ARIA
Roles, states, and properties added by plugins or builders that don't match the element they're placed on.
Missing document language
Pages that don't declare a language, which some themes and multilingual setups leave off entirely.
Unclear link purpose
'Read more' repeated across a page and empty links that don't convey where they go out of context.
Automated scanning is where you start, not the finish line
These are the machine-testable parts of WCAG, roughly 30-40% of the success criteria. They are the fastest risk to remove and the first thing a demand letter tends to check. They are not the whole picture: whether your alt text is actually meaningful, whether a custom Elementor interaction works by keyboard, and whether your content reads in a logical order still need a human reviewer. An automated scan does not certify a site as fully compliant and is not a substitute for a manual audit.
When you're ready to fix what we find, AI-written suggestions are available using your own API key, and they never change your site on their own.
Related Resources
WCAG 2.2 Checker
Scan any page against WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA success criteria, the technical standard behind ADA, EAA, and Section 508.
ADA Compliance Checker
Check your site against ADA requirements based on the WCAG 2.2 Level AA criteria courts reference in enforcement.
Color Contrast Checker
Test foreground and background color pairs against WCAG contrast ratios before you set them in your theme or blocks.
View Pricing
Free single-page scans available. Upgrade for multi-page crawling, full reports, AI fix suggestions, and scheduled monitoring.
Other platform accessibility checkers
Free WCAG 2.2 scanners tuned to how each website builder works.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my WordPress site ADA compliant?
Do WordPress accessibility plugins or overlays make my site compliant?
How do I add alt text in WordPress?
What WordPress accessibility issues can an automated scan catch?
Check Your WordPress Site for Accessibility Now
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