Access theme screen shot
Dean, over at Bushido Designs, has responded to my call for an accessible WordPress theme. In a recent post, Surprise! Your “semantic, accessible, search engine friendly” WordPress theme is none of the above, Dean announced his development and release of the initial version of the Access theme. Among other things, the themes is designed from the ground up to be both screen-reader friendly and readable for the partially sighted.
People with poor eyesight have a difficult time reading small text, and text which has a low contrast ratio to the page’s background. So while your 10 pixel, gray, Times New Roman text on a black background may be fine for young people with good eyesight, it’s less than ideal for people with aging eyes or visual impairment. And your links without underlines may be fine for people who can see colors, colorblind people won’t be able to distinguish them from plain text.
When I put this blog together, I cobbled together a theme to suit my needs, A (Partly) DIY Accessible WordPress Theme. But it was not built for accessibility. I have no idea if it works well with screen readers, only that it works for my vision and my visual adaptations. So I am quite excited to see Dean embrace this project.
The Access theme is still in its first version. There are some bugs with search results and some additional feature that would improve accessibility. For one, I would like to see built-in compatibility with the WP-Print plugin, which provides accessible printer-friendly versions of each post, something that I have blogged about before.
If you can, please take the theme for a test drive. Let Dean (or me) know what you think. You can dowmload the Access theme here.
P.S. Are there any other accessible WP themes? Are there guidelines for making themes accessible?
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Tim,
I’m not a web designer nor developer. So I don’t have any theme released for the public. But I do respect on web accessibility and web standard. My current theme, focusing on accessibility, even not yet semantically enough.
If you have a time, would you like to review my blog theme for some advices?
Thank you, Tim.
Hi,
We’ve been using the accessible Seabeast theme for WordPress and are interested in changing to a new theme. The Seabeast theme needs a lot of modifications to make it compatible with WordPress 2.8. I was happy to find this post but none of the download links work. Have you removed the theme from public access?
Good evening,
if you’re still looking for an accessible theme for WordPress suitable for 2.8 and respectful of the Wcag 2.0 recommendationd, I would be very pleased if you tested “Ingegno”.
You may download it at
http://opere.4elementi.info/wp-content/themes/en_ingegno/en_ingegno.zip
Thank you very much
Francesco
Thanks for this post, I will be buying you a cup of coffee! :) I just saw this post, but so far your page is fully accessible for voiceover, screen reader for the mac. If you want I can run some tests with others. I am a totally blind interaction designer and even though I can design accessible webs, I cannot fully develop them, so I will be glad to test drive your theme. Do you know of a good accessible wp theme for 3.2? Since you are a photographer, do you know of any good theme for portfolios? I have been trying several, but they are good for the sighted, but not so good for screen reader and it would be bad of me in principal to use them for my portfolio, since I bug my colleagues all the time about not being able to access some of their work. Do you know also of any good wp developer who cares and knows about accessibility and take on accessible developing gigs? thanks for any info. Keep up the good work!
I am still looking for accessible wordpress themes, expecially for the blind photographers web site. keep me posted if you find one! or develop one!
tim