Using accessiBe WordPress To Make Your Site ADA Compliant

Accessibility is something we all need to be thinking about. It doesn’t just mean making sure your website works with a screen reader and other assistive technology, though that’s certainly part of it. Accessibility also means designing in consideration of people who may have temporary or permanent disabilities. The latter kind of accessibility can be harder because you might have to reconsider your design or the way it interacts with user input. For example, you might have a page that calls for users to enter their full name. A person’s name can be sensitive information, so you don’t necessarily want them entering it on every page of your site.

But what if someone forgets their first or last name? Or what if they are physically unable to type more than one letter at a time? That’s where accessiBe WordPress comes in. It’s an accessibility plugin for WordPress that has two main features: input prompt and auto-complete.

Input Prompt

Let’s say you have that field above asking for someone’s full name on your site, but there are certain pages where you aren’t concerned with this information. accessiBe allows you to set up an input prompt that will only pop up on pages where it’s needed. The prompts are shown as a tooltip box that appears when the user hovers over an input field, and it can contain either text or images (or both). There is also a setting for how long the popup stays visible before hiding itself.

Auto-Complete

If someone wants to type in their name but has trouble typing, they might benefit from Auto-Complete . It’s like Gmail’s “Did You Mean: Murphy ?” feature, except instead of suggesting email addresses, accessiBe suggests words based on what your users already typed. Even if they make a mistake and need to delete part of their entry, this function remembers what they’ve started typing and offers it as a possible suggestion.

Both of these features can be enabled and customized through the accessiBe settings panel. It’s also where you would specify the input prompts for every new entry field on your WordPress site. You can specify an image or text prompt, adjust the tooltip delay, choose to show the popup on hover over only, and more. Once your prompts are set up, it’s as easy as activating Input Prompts on all those fields you want users to see.

Accessibility is important because people with certain disabilities need some websites that work with assistive technology like screen readers. They require forms/interfaces that allow them to type in a simpler way than they normally could. accessiBe aims to help WordPress users create accessible sites by giving them tools to design their forms in a way that promotes input. This keeps the site owner happy because it saves time and makes for more efficient content entry, but it also helps their visitors by making pages easier to use.

After that, you can just activate accessiBe on all the input fields you want prompts for and set up the formatting of your popup windows. That’s it! Now people with certain disabilities can use your site without having to struggle because now they can make changes in order to make their lives easier.