Creating accessible content

- [Narrator] Although WordPress offers a lot in the way of accessibility, you cannot simply install WordPress, setup a site with any theme, and expect it to be accessible. This is because WordPress isn't a monolithic system. Any website built with WordPress is a collection of many different pieces assembled together. The Core of WordPress generates a small part of the code, but much more of your website will come from your theme, plugins, and your choices when adding content. Let's use the analogy that a WordPress website is like a house. In this house, WordPress has created the framing and foundation. You've got the bones of a home, but with WordPress alone you don't yet have a house, at least not one that is at all usable. When you add a themE, it will set up siding, and roofing materials. It'll create doors, points where you can access your house. It'll create windows and add all the ornamental elements that make your house look great from the street. Your content is what you put in each room, making sure that each room in your house serves a well-defined purpose, and has each piece of furniture you need. Plugins are the plumbing and mechanicals of your house. They're the pieces of a website that make sure it is able to perform the necessary functions for your website. Plugins are what transform your house between a home, home business, retail store, or apartment building. With the right choice of plugins the purpose of your new building takes shape. Within this analogy, we can start to illustrate how accessibility can go wrong in WordPress. No matter how solid the underlying framing and foundation may be, your theme, plugins, and content can cover this over in ways that create accessibility problems. The theme explicitly provides a set of colors and fonts. These fonts may be difficult to read. The colors chosen might create contrast problems that people who are color blind have difficulty seeing. While WordPress provides accessible search and comment forms, these can be replaced by the theme, so they may not be correctly labeled, and can't be identified using a screen reader. The HTML of the navigation menu comes from WordPress, but once it's styled by the theme using CSS and JavaScript it may not be navigable using the keyboard. Plugins can add a whole new interaction experience to your website. And WordPress has no control over what that experience might be like. Any time you install a plugin, you're either changing part of how WordPress normally creates output, or you're doing something totally new. Whatever that plugin does, you need to take responsibility for verifying whether or not it is accessible. Your content is a mixture of output created by WordPress, created by plugins, and your own creative decisions. As you will see through this course, the output created in WordPress, while fully capable of being accessible, needs to be considered with care. A WordPress website can absolutely be accessible, but you will need to become familiar with finding accessible resources, investigating the accessibility of your site, and learn the best and worst of what WordPress has to offer.