Editoria11y ("editorial accessibility ally") is a quality assurance tool built for an author's workflow:
- It provides instant feedback. Authors do not need to remember to press a button or visit a dashboard to check their work.
- It checks in context on pages, not just within the post editor, allowing it to test content edited in widgets or theme features.
- It focuses exclusively on content issues: assisting authors at improving the things that are their responsibility.
This plugin is the WordPress adaptation of the open-source
Editoria11y library. Tests run in the browser and findings are stored in your own database; nothing is sent to any third party. It is meant to
supplement, not replace,
testing your code and visual design with developer-focused tools and testing practices.
The authoring experience
Check out a
demo of the checker itself.
- When logged-in authors and editors are viewing pages, Editoria11y inserts tooltips marking any issues present on the current page. Issues are also highlighted while editing in the Block Editor / Gutenberg.
- Tooltips explain each problem and what actions are needed to resolve it. Some issues are marked as "manual checks," can be hidden or marked as OK.
- Clicking the main toggle shows and hides the tooltips.
- The main toggle also allows authors to jump to the next issue, restore previously dismissed alerts, visualize text alternatives for images on the page ("alts"), and view the document's heading outline.
- Optionally, the checker can also outline blocks with issues while the author is editing the content.
The admin experience
- Filterable reports let you explore recent issues, which pages have the most issues, which issues are most common, and which issues have been dismissed. These populate and update as content is viewed and updated.
- Various settings are available to constrain checks to specific parts of the page and tweak the sensitivity of several tests.
The tests
- Text alternatives for visual content
- Images with no alt text
- Images with a filename as alt text
- Images with very long alt text
- Alt text that contains redundant text like “image of” or “photo of”
- Images in links with alt text that appears to be describing the image instead of the link destination
- Embedded visualizations that usually require a text alternative
- Meaningful links
- Links with no text
- Links titled with a filename
- Links only titled with generic text: “click here,” “learn more,” “download,” etc.
- Links that open in a new window without warning
- Document outline and structure
- Skipped heading levels
- Empty headings
- Very long headings
- Suspiciously short blockquotes that may actually be headings
- All-bold paragraphs with no punctuation that may actually be headings
- Suspicious formatting that should probably be converted to a list (asterisks and incrementing numbers/letters prefixes)
- Tables without headers
- Empty table header cells
- Tables with document headers ("Header 3") instead of table headers
- General quality assurance
- LARGE QUANTITIES OF CAPS LOCK TEXT
- Links to PDFs and other documents, reminding the user to test the download for accessibility or provide an alternate, accessible format
- Video embeds, reminding the user to add closed captions
- Audio embeds, reminding the user to provide a transcript
- Social media embeds, reminding the user to provide alt attributes
- Custom results provided by your JS
Note that work is proceeding on the
UI rewrite, and feedback would be much appreciated.
2.0.4
- Fixes race condition that caused the checker to not always appear in the block editor.
- Adds color highlighting inside the headings panel.
2.0.3
- Fixes alignment of issue count in tooltip when there is exactly 1 issue.
2.0.2
- Improved tip placement logic, and some visual refinements.
2.0.1
- Fixes some alignment and display bugs, especially in Safari.
2.0.0
- Updates to the 2.3 branch of the checker library. This is a significant redesign of the tips and panel, so please do test before sending to production on complex sites. The new interface can be tested on the Editoria11y library demo site.
- New interface for the in-editor checker brings in the full tooltip rather than a simple outline, and eliminates compatibility issues with other plugins that were also modifying the Gutenberg interface.
1.0.21
1.0.20
1.0.19
1.0.18
1.0.17