Editoria11y Accessibility Checker

Description

Editoria11y (“editorial accessibility ally”) is a multilingual, automatic, open source accessibility checker that provides live feedback as you work, with site-wide issue reporting and dismissals.

Editoria11y is built around four key needs for ongoing quality assurance, both before and after a site launch:

• Tests run in real-time, offering inline corrections and advice as authors type in CKEditor in Gutenberg.
• It checks rendered content in published pages and previews, allowing it to detect issues that only appear after Drupal assembles the content.
• Tips use plain language, to both correct and teach.
• All data is private. Tests run in-browser, and reports are stored on your own server.

Editoria11y is meant to supplement, not replace, testing with comprehensive tools and real assistive devices.

This plugin is the official WordPress implementation 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.

Project supporters, through code contributions, testing, help translating or purchasing a license, can also enable a developer and auditor tools suite: ~50 additional tests for code and contrast problems, a custom test builder and a site crawler. We are at ~30% of our goal for 2026 support, which should be enough to sponsor work to add a link checker. Check the project roadmap for active projects and ideas for future work.

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) and Classic Editor (TinyMCE).
• Tooltips explain each problem and what actions are needed to resolve it. Some issues are “manual checks,” which have buttons to ignore the check or mark the content 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”), view the document’s heading outline, and view site-wide detection lists.

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 when published content is viewed by logged-in authors.
• Various settings are available to constrain checks to specific parts of the page and tweak the sensitivity of several tests.

The tests

The 50+ content tests include

• Text alternatives for visual content
  • Images with no alt text
  • Images with a filename as alt text
  • Images with very long alt text
  • Images with fake alt text to get around field validation (e.g. “TBD”)
  • 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 (sequences of sentences that start with asterisks, emoji or incrementing numbers/letters)
  • 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

Is it free?

Yes. Mostly.

Editoria11y promotes accessibility in a unique way. Its tools are highly effective at helping non-technical authors prepare content that can be enjoyed equally by disabled Web users. We consider this a public good, so this plugin, with Editoria11y’s core test suite and reports, is free to use. If you are using an accessible base theme or have a good manual testing workflow and don’t mess with colors in the block editor, that should be all you need.

Editoria11y is not, however, free to develop or support, so quality assurance features for developers and auditors ask for a CSA subscription, via a “contribute what you can” model, with free tiers for active code, testing and translation contributors. We do not want financial limitations to prevent anyone from using any of the accessibility testing features, so contact us if the lowest support tier would present an undue burden and you are not able to contribute in another way.

Supporter tools

Editoria11y CSA (“Community Supported Add-ons”) membership provides ~50 additional tests, as well as broad quality assurance tools for site owners:

• Developer and contrast tests.
• Role-based split configuration, allowing developers and content creators to check different parts of the page and apply different tests.
• A custom-test builder.
• One-click, site-wide dismissals.
• A site crawler to refresh the site-wide reports after major site changes, to save having to manually click through the menus.

Examples of developer tests in the CSA submodule:

• Broken in-page anchor link
• Duplicate ID attribute
• Text has insufficient contrast
• Button has no accessible label
• Button label includes the word “button”
• Visible label doesn’t match accessible name
• Input has no associated label
• Input uses only an invisible label
• Input uses only a placeholder as a label
• Element hidden from screen readers but still keyboard-focusable
• Positive tabindex breaks reading and tab order
• Page title missing
• Page language not declared
• Viewport prevents text scaling

Credit

Editoria11y’s WordPress plugin was created by Princeton University’s Web Development Services team:

• John Jameson: Editoria11y JS and CMS integrations
• Jason Partyka: Devops
• Brian Osborne: Code review
• Michael Muzzie: Wapuu photos

Editoria11y’s core test suite is co-maintained code with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Sa11y Accessibility Checker.

New feature development comes through by grants from academic institutions and companies, as well as direct contributions from project users through Editoria11y CSA subscriptions.