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Why do I care if my wordpress theme is accessible or not?

Well, firstly because we are sure that you are a nice person and that if YOU had a disability, YOU would like to still use your website. Secondly if you are in business, in the UK  alone, the "disabled pound" is worth 80 BILLION  GBP and that's a lot of customers and money for your company to exclude by having a website they can't use. Thirdly, the internet is fundamentally about connecting people to people.  If you website is inaccessible its simply not doing what the web is for.

Why aren’t other Wordpress Templates accessible?

Some are – but most designs would admit that it would be fair to say that this is often more luck than judgement. Designers are starting to realise how important  web standards are but often mistake these standards as guaranteeing disabled accessibility. Sadly, they don’t.  In fact sometimes, WC3 they directly contradict the needs of disabled people which is why they have been trying to make new ones for nearly ten years now.


However, some of the basic design elements that are used by almost all wordpress templates, such as fixed widths, table-based layout, using headings and inline code for visual styles all make wordpress sites (and all other community, open source blogs) sadly very inaccessible.   Many designers learned their trade long before the blogs and social networking exploded onto the scene and simply don’t realsie how old style (and by old we mean 1990’s!) coding causes problems for both newer browsers, hardware and for disabled people.