I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the state of WordPress, accessibility-wise.
Well, okay, on the reader side of things, anyway. I haven’t gone to any great trouble to evaluate the status of the admin interface, but have noted that in some places — e.g., the widget configuration page — there’s an explicit “please turn on accessible mode” toggle, which implies people have been thinking about it, at least.
Anyway, the couple of styles I tried out before settling on this one all passed WAVE with flying colours. This was most pleasing. The only modification I felt compelled to make was adding the skip link up top.
Plugins, however… Every plugin I’ve so far enabled which does anything at all to the reader experience has caused WAVE to highlight a problem. In each case it’s been extremely simple: the plugin has added an image, but not included an alt attribute. It’s not even remotely difficult to get this right, which says pretty loud and clear that the plugin developers concerned haven’t given any thought to the matter at all.
It wasn’t difficult to correct the problem. Avalicious only had one spot where it needed the code “alt=''” inserted. Simple Twitter Connect was a bit tougher, as it’s a more complex bundle of code, but once again it only needed one modification once the correct location had been identified.
I’ll be passing those changes back upstream, and hopefully they’ll be incorporated, because having to maintain my own versions would be most annoying, and one can’t expect that the average WordPress user is going to be able or willing to dig in to the code to fix these things for themselves, even if they notice there’s a problem.