We make one of these, so read this knowing that. We have tried to write the comparison we wanted to find when we started, which means saying plainly where other plugins are the better answer.
The first decision, and it is not close
There are two categories of plugin sold as WordPress accessibility, and they have almost nothing in common.
An overlay injects a script into your front end. It layers a widget over your site, usually a little icon in the corner offering larger text, higher contrast and a greyscale mode. Your markup is untouched. Take the plugin away and every barrier is exactly where it was.
A remediation or testing tool works on the site itself: it finds problems, and it either tells you about them or changes the underlying code.
Do not use an overlay. This is not a close call and not a matter of taste.
- The browser and the operating system already do everything an overlay’s controls do, better, and users who need them already have them configured.
- They routinely make things worse. An overlay’s own ARIA can fight the screen reader it is trying to help.
- Disabled users reject them. The Overlay Fact Sheet is signed by several hundred accessibility practitioners, including spec editors for WCAG, ARIA and HTML, and internal accessibility staff at Google, Microsoft, Apple and the BBC.
- The FTC has taken action against one vendor over its marketing claims. If you bought an overlay for legal cover, you bought the opposite.
A useful test when you are reading a plugin’s page: does it promise to make you compliant? No tool can determine that, so a plugin that says it will is telling you something about its honesty rather than its capability.
What no plugin can do
Automated testing reaches part of WCAG. Estimates vary by who is counting and what they are counting, but no serious practitioner puts it near all of it, and the parts left over are not the easy ones.
A machine can tell you an image has no alt. It cannot tell you whether the
alt you wrote is accurate, or whether the image needed describing at all. It
can find a heading that skips a level. It cannot tell you whether your headings
describe the document. Focus order, meaningful sequence, whether an error
message actually explains the error, whether your video’s captions match the
audio — all of that is a person.
So the honest framing is that a plugin does the mechanical part quickly and consistently, and tells you where the mechanical part stops. Anything promising more than that is selling you something. Testing with disabled users is not a nice-to-have you get to after the plugin is green.
The three things a plugin might actually do
Work out which of these you want before comparing anything, because plugins that do different jobs are not really competitors.
Patch the theme. Supply the things a theme left out, site-wide and automatically: a skip link, a visible focus outline, a language attribute, a page title. No findings list, no dashboard. You switch it on and the markup improves.
Check pages as you write them. Flag issues in the editor, before publishing, so the person creating the problem is the person who sees it. This is the one that changes behaviour over time, because it puts the feedback next to the writing.
Audit and fix what is already there. Scan everything, produce a list, work through it. This is what you want when you have inherited a site, or when somebody has asked you for a report.
Most sites eventually want two of the three.
The honest table
| Plugin | Installs | Rating | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| WP Accessibility | 60,000 | 96/100 | Patching the theme |
| Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker | 10,000 | 98/100 | Checking pages as you write |
| Accessibility Remediation (ours) | new | none yet | Auditing and fixing the code |
Figures from the plugin directory’s own API on 24 September 2026.
WP Accessibility is by Joe Dolson, who contributes to the W3C and has been doing this longer than most of the field has existed. It is free, small, and it does the theme-patching job properly. If that is the job you have, install it and stop reading. Several of our own site-wide fixes cover the same ground and we would not pretend to have improved on his judgement.
Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is the mature choice and the one with a company behind it. Its in-editor checking is the best version of that idea on WordPress, and if you want paid support from people who do accessibility consulting for a living, this is the one. Be clear on the tier line: scanning your whole site at once, the centralised report and the export live in the paid plan.
Ours is the audit-and-fix one. It scans every page twice — once on the server against the markup, once in your browser for the things only a painted page reveals, like real contrast and real target size — then proposes changes to your own code that you review as a preview and a diff before anything applies. Whole-site scanning is free, because a check you cannot run is a barrier nobody told your visitor about. It is new, it has almost no installs, and it has no reviews yet. That is a real reason to prefer one of the others today.
Five questions to ask of any of them
- Does it touch my front end? If a script goes out to every visitor, know exactly what it does and why.
- What happens when I uninstall it? Fixes written into your markup, your CSS or WordPress’s own alt text field stay. Fixes applied at run time by a script vanish, and so does whatever you thought you had fixed.
- Does it phone home? Plenty of scanners send your pages to a service to be analysed. That may be fine, but you should know, and if you are handling anything sensitive you should check the answer before installing.
- Does it tell me what it cannot detect? A tool that reports only what it found, with no coverage statement, is teaching you that a clean result means an accessible site.
- What is free and what is not? Specifically: can you scan the whole site, and can you export a report.
Where to start if you are starting today
Install a checker and fix the things it finds on your five most important pages. Then run your own keyboard test: unplug the mouse, tab through a page, and see whether you can tell where you are and reach everything. That takes ten minutes and finds problems no plugin on this page will catch.
Then read the WAI’s guidance on involving users, and work out how you are going to do that, because everything above is the preparation for it rather than a substitute.