Theme Accessibility
The accessibility of a WordPress blog is largely determined by the theme chosen for it. Although none of the themes currently available on UAL’s myBlog platform are completely free of errors, some come very close. To help users assess which theme affords the best user accessibility, we ran some tests…
Test results
Each theme’s score reflects the amount of issues flagged by the WAVE tool during the tests. This means that the lower the number, the fewer the errors and thus better accessibility.
| Theme | Score | Rating | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Twenty Twenty | 7 | Good | Twenty Twenty has no major errors, no contrast errors and very few warnings, making it the most accessible theme available. |
| Twenty Twentyone | 7.5 | Good | Twenty Twentyone has no major errors, no contrast errors and very few warnings, making it the second most accessible theme available. |
| Twenty Twelve | 8 | Good | Twenty Twelve has no major errors, a single incident of low contrast text and only a few warnings, making it one of the most accessible themes available on the platform. |
| Twenty Thirteen | 8 | Good | Twenty Thirteen has no major errors, a single incident of low contrast text and only a few warnings, making it one of the most accessible themes available on the platform. |
| Twenty Fifteen | 10.5 | Good | Twenty Fifteen has no major errors, two incidents of low contrast text and only a few warnings, making it one of the more accessible themes available on the platform. |
| Twenty Seventeen | 10.5 | Good | Twenty Seventeen has no major errors, four incidents of low contrast text and only a few warnings, making it one of the more accessible themes available on the platform. |
| Twenty Sixteen | 13 | Good | Twenty Sixteen has no major errors, two incidents of low contrast text and a moderate amount of warnings, making it a very good choice. |
| Twenty Fourteen | 15.5 | Good | Twenty Fourteen has no major errors, a small number of contrast errors and only a few warnings, making it a good choice. |
| Twenty Nineteen | 23.5 | Fair | Twenty Nineteen has no major errors, a moderate amount of contrast errors and a quite a few warnings, making it an ok choice. |
| Madrigal | 22 | Fair | Ten errors (missing form labels, empty buttons and empty links), no contrast errors and a moderate amount of warnings. |
| Proxima | 37.5 | Fair | Proxima has only one error, a moderate amount of low contrast text and quite a few warnings. |
| Twenty Eleven | 41.5 | Fair | Twenty Eleven has no major errors and fewer contrast errors, giving it a better score than the previous year’s theme. There are still a number of warnings. |
| Cell | 47.5 | Fair | Cell’s score was negatively impacted by a large amount of low contrast (light grey) text. We found only one error that would affect screen reader users. There were also a moderate number of warnings. |
| Responsive | 48 | Fair | Responsive has no errors and a moderate number of warnings about redundant elements. The score is primarily influenced by the number of contrast errors. |
| Oxygen | 66.5 | Poor | Similiar to Cell, Oxygen’s score was negatively impacted by a large amount of low contrast text as well as insufficient link colour contrast. We found only one error that would affect screen reader users. There were also quite a few warnings. |
| Twenty Ten | 69.5 | Poor | Twenty Ten has no major errors but is let down by numerous incidents of low contrast text. The theme also received a number of warnings. |
| ColorMag | 92.5 | Poor | Across both pages, 5 errors were found (2 missing form labels, 2 empty buttons and an empty link). There were very many instances of low contrast text and a moderate number of warnings. |
| Themify Grido | 96.5 | Poor | WAVE found no errors in this theme, but there are huge amount of contrast errors and warnings, making this the second worst theme for accessibility on the platform. |
| Yoko | 103.5 | Poor | Yoko has three major errors, a huge number of contrast errors and a fair number of warnings, making it the worst theme available for accessibility. |
Test methodology
While our accessibility tests aren’t exhaustive, they should hopefully give an indication of how compliant a theme is to WCAG 2.1 standards. To test each theme we ran the WAVE browser extension on two separate pages (homepage and sample post) of a simple test blog. We recorded any errors from both pages that were flagged and used a rudimentary formula to generate a weighted scoring system.
How the scoring system was calculated
WAVE generates a report for a page that flags a number of attributes (both positive and negative) that are pertinent to that page’s accessibility. For the purposes of this document, we only recorded issues from the three categories that would negatively impact a theme’s accessibility:
- Errors – major issues that would break a site for screen reader or keyboard only users.
- Contrast Errors – low contrast text is difficult to read for most users and completely illegible for the visually impaired.
- Warnings – A wide array of issues that although not necessarily site-breaking, provide a poor user experience for users of assistive technology.
To calculate the scores attributed to each theme, we:
- Averaged the number of errors accross the two pages per category (see above).
- Weighted the scores to reflect an issue’s impact by multiplying errors x 3, contrast errors x 2 and warnings x 1.
- Added up the three sets of adjusted numbers to create a ‘total score’.
- Applied user-friendly labels to the total scores based on the following ranges:
- 0-20: Good
- 20-50: Fair
- 50+: Poor