WOWStudio Accessibility Remediation

Description

WOWStudio Accessibility Remediation helps you find, fix and document accessibility issues in your WordPress site. It scans your pages against WCAG 2.2 A and AA success criteria, explains what it found in plain language, and proposes real changes to your markup that you review before anything is applied.

It is not an accessibility overlay. Nothing is injected into your front end, and no widget or toolbar is added for your visitors. Fixes are changes to the code itself.

How it works

• Scan, twice. A server-side scan reads the rendered HTML and checks it against a registry of WCAG rules. A second pass then runs in your browser, on the page as it was actually painted, to check the things no parser can know: real contrast, real target sizes, real layout. No external service is contacted for either.
• See it. The inspector puts the findings beside a live preview of the page. Choosing a finding highlights the element it is about, so you are never left guessing which paragraph or which button.
• Understand. Every issue is tagged with its WCAG success criterion and severity, and labelled either auto-detected or needs manual review.
• Fix. Suggested markup fixes are shown as a preview and a diff, and applied fixes are stored in a reversible override layer that never overwrites your content. Findings caused by styling instead get a style rule, written into your own Additional CSS — where you can read, edit or delete it without this plugin.
• Check the fix worked. After a style rule is applied, the page is loaded again and measured again. If something in your theme overrode the rule, you are told that, rather than being told it is fixed.
• Check how hard it is to read. Pages are measured against the Flesch–Kincaid grade level, and you can add a plain-language summary where the text is heavy going.
• Describe your images. One screen lists every image in your media library that has never been described, with a field beside each. Type, save, move on — instead of opening forty media screens.
• Do it site-wide. Check every page and post in one run, in the background. There is no page limit and no paid tier.
• Document. Generate an accessibility statement you edit and publish, including the feedback contact mechanism European rules expect.

Honesty about what automated testing can do

Automated testing can only detect part of WCAG. Many criteria — meaningful sequence, focus order, whether your alt text is actually accurate — require a human being. This plugin tells you which is which, in a coverage panel you can read at any time, and it will never report your site as finished.

This plugin does not determine or certify whether your site complies with the ADA, the European Accessibility Act, Section 508, AODA, the UK Equality Act, or any other law. It is a tool that helps you do accessibility work and keep a record of it. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for testing with disabled users.

What it will not do

• No front-end accessibility widget, toolbar, or overlay.
• No silent changes to your content. Every fix is reviewed by a person first.
• No claim, anywhere, that your site is compliant, certified, or protected from legal action.
• No conformance document published without your explicit review and attestation.

Bundled libraries

This plugin bundles Action Scheduler by Automattic, which runs the
background work — checking many pages at once — so that long jobs never block
an admin page or time out half-finished. It is licensed GPLv3 or later; this
plugin’s own code is GPLv2 or later.

Action Scheduler makes no outbound requests of its own. Source and documentation:
https://actionscheduler.org

Source code and how to build it

Every line of this plugin is public, including the JavaScript and CSS that ship
compiled:

https://github.com/wowstudio-dev/WOWStudio-Accessibility-Remediation

The admin interface is React, built with @wordpress/scripts (webpack and
Babel), and the styles are Sass. What ships in build/ is generated from
assets/src/ in that repository:

• build/index.js from assets/src/index.js — the admin screens
• build/style-index.css from assets/src/style.scss
• build/editor.js from assets/src/editor/index.js — the block editor panel
• build/editor.css from assets/src/editor/editor.scss
• build/blocks/statement/index.js from assets/src/blocks/statement/index.js
  — the accessibility statement block
• build/blocks/statement/style-index.css from
  assets/src/blocks/statement/style.scss

Each stylesheet also has an -rtl counterpart, generated for right-to-left
locales from the same source.

To build it yourself, from a clone of that repository:

npm install then `npm run build` produces `build/`.
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader produces `vendor/`.
bin/build.sh --zip does both and assembles the distributable zip.

npm run start rebuilds on change while developing, and `bash bin/gate.sh`

runs the ten checks — tests, linters, static analysis and the guards — that
every commit has to pass.

Not everything is compiled. assets/front/site-fixes.js is the only JavaScript
this plugin puts on the front end, and it ships exactly as it was written:
readable, commented, and loaded only when a site-wide fix that needs it is
switched on.

External services

This plugin contacts no external service, ever. There is no API, no account, no
telemetry, and no phone-home. The scanner, the fixes, the alt-text screen, the
statement generator and the reports all run entirely on your own site, and the
plugin works the same whether or not the server can reach the internet.

That is also why there are no scanning limits. Nothing is metered because
nothing is being paid for per page.

Technical details