I have long believed that digital accessibility and WordPress belong together. WordPress remains one of the most influential content management systems in the world, which makes how we design, build, and extend it an accessibility issue at scale.
In 2025, I intended to publish a foundational piece that examined how accessibility should be intentionally integrated into a WordPress site, from theme architecture to content workflows. Like many well-intentioned plans, that work was interrupted by reality.
The start of 2026 brought a more practical imperative, the need to design and build new WordPress themes for two sites, my personal site and 24 Accessibility. Rather than treat these as isolated redesigns, I am using them as living case studies. This series documents the process of building WordPress themes with accessibility considered from the first line of code, not retrofitted at the end. Along the way, I will also examine both existing and new plugins through an accessibility lens.
This series will focus on three core areas:
• Accessible WordPress theme development
• WordPress plugin accessibility, including hands-on testing to evaluate real-world usability
• Content accessibility, where many otherwise solid implementations still fall apart
For these redesigns, I am working locally with full copies of the production sites. I use UpdraftPlus for backups and to clone content, themes, and plugins into a local development environment. Designing with real content exposes accessibility issues earlier and leads to better decisions. On Windows, I rely on Local to keep environment setup simple and repeatable.
Up next, creating a WordPress Bootstrap starter theme, accessibility first.